Microsoft unhappy with release of 'Office' training video

Microsoft on Friday was unhappy with the online release of a training video that was made to look like an episode of the popular British comedy "The Office," and featured the show's star and creator Ricky Gervais.

Microsoft in the United Kingdom made the 2004 video as a fun way to instruct people on how not to act at work. The 37-minute video was only for internal use, but somehow got released on the Web.

In the two-part video, Gervais plays David Brent, the bumbling boss in "The Office," in what could easily pass for a lost episode of the BBC series. On the film, he is being interviewed about (by) Stephen Merchant, who also was as actor on the original show.

"The two videos that Ricky and Stephen recorded for us in 2004 were a light-hearted way of getting our staff to think about the values they attach to working at Microsoft and, through the character of David Brent, illustrate what not to do in the workplace," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email. "These videos were produced for internal use and were never intended to be viewed by the public."

Microsoft was trying to determine how the video was released, the spokesperson said.

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Windows Vista Ultimate Priced at $450 on Microsoft.com Canada

Microsoft.com Canada has released pricing for Windows Vista. Windows Vista Ultimate is listed at $499 Canadian which translates into $450.36 in USD. Home Premium is listed at $299 or $269.86 USD, Vista Ultimate Upgrade is priced at $299 or $269.86 USD, while Home Premium Upgrade is $199 or $179.60 USD.

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Bharti Airtel has tied up with Microsoft

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel has tied up with Microsoft to push mobile phones based on the Windows Mobile (5.0) platform for corporate customers. The move means that Airtel has finally decided to move beyond its two year old exclusive alliance with Blackberry, which apparently has not been as successful as was expected at the time of launch in India despite the hype around it. Airtel officials said while Blackberry was viewed primarily as e-mail access device and did well in India, Microsoft-based mobiles were expected to take enterprise mobility into a new realm with offerings like MS Office suiteetc. Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan said Windows platform offered about 18,000 applications and had 6.5 lakh developers worldwide, a range that no other product offered.

Microsoft 20Million Buy Back Offer

New Zealand’s very own Chris Liddell (CFO of Microsoft) appeared on a television talk show tonight announcing a Microsoft “buy back” deal that closes in America tonight. Microsoft is buying back 8% of their shares from current shareholders. This ”tender” for the shareholders shares is set to cost Microsoft around 20 Billion U.S. Dollars.

Microsoft reported a fall in fourth quarter net income to $2.83billion from $3.70billion in the same period last year, thanks in part to one-off legal costs, However Revenues increased by 16% over the period to $11.8 billion.
Nevertheless, it issued a bullish forecast for 2007, predicting revenues of between $49.7billion and $50.7billion and operating income of up to $19.4billion.

Microsoft vs Korea over MSN Messenger dispute

We all know that Microsoft and Korea have a 'special' bond when it comes to Microsoft software and once again Korea and Microsoft are at war and this time MSN Messenger is to blame.

Korea's top Internet service provider, KT is disputing with Microsoft when users could not connect to the MSN Messenger servers for several hours on Thursday morning. The rest of Korea were not effected by the downtime leaving KT in uproar when they discovered they were the only company effected.

Microsoft blamed KT's pipeline leading to their data center saying that it was the cause of the trouble. However KT spokesman Hwang Dae-woon claimed Microsoft were at blame because two ports were out in the United States. 12.6 million broadband users in Korea blamed Microsoft for the problem, when they found themselves not being able to log into Messenger for hours.

Microsoft were also accused for not notifying the company of the problem immediately and working on a quick solution. A KT spokesman pointed out how millions lost connections with friends and how businessmen were cut out of conversations possibly losing important contracts.

>> View Source

Microsoft Video Trailer of Windows Small Business Server 2003

"DaSBS Code" Microsoft Video Trailer of Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2

What if a server held the secrets that would change small businesses forever? Click the photo and find the code. Movie "Trailer" presented at the Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 launch event in Boston, July 2006 "DaSBS Code" Video Trailer: A Funny Video about Small Business Server 2003 R2 Continue to this article at Bink.nu

Windows Vista 'voice recognition poetry' on a shirt

Remember last week's Windows Vista speech recognition demonstration gone awry? Some enterprising person is now selling a shirt featuring the resulting jumble of words: "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." Continue At Source

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Windows, Office updates coming soon

Windows, Office updates coming soon

Microsoft has 12 security bulletins in store for next Tuesday that address both Windows and Office issues.

Ten Windows bulletins will be released for Windows and two for Office as part of Microsoft's monthly patching schedule. Specific details onthe types of issues that the bulletins address were not available, but at least one update for each product is considered critical and some will require a restart, Microsoft said in a notice posted on its Web site.

Last month after Microsoft released its monthly batch of patches, exploits for flaws in its PowerPoint presentation software were released on the Web. Tuesday's patches could be fixes for those issues, but Wednesday might signal the release of other exploits for flaws the company has yet to patch.

On the Windows front, security companies recently noticed a variant of an exploit for a flaw that Microsoft had previously patched, and Tuesday's updates could also contain patches that address that variant.

News source: CNET News.com

Microsoft: Push the Windows Vista date back

Microsoft: Push the Windows Vista date back

Earlier this week Neowin reported about the call from Longhorn Blogs for Microsoft to give Windows Vista more time. Yesterday WinSuperSite.com and WinCustomize.com put up their own views on whether Vista is ready which could be summed up as "No. God, no."

 

So what exactly is the situation with Windows Vista? What is the no-marketing spin truth of it? Here are the facts: Windows Vista is scheduled to be made available for corporate customers by the end of the year and be "Generally available" in January 2007.  To make that date, Microsoft essentially has to "go gold" by the end of October.  That means release candidates would start this month (August 2006).  In theory, release candidates are supposed to be versions of Windows Vista that are believed to be ready to go and just need some final testing.

 

So where do things stand right now?  Build 5472 went out a week ago.  5484 was given out earlier this week to selected beta testers.  Most (okay all) of the beta testers we've talked to have said the same thing: It's not where it needs to be to make that date.

 

The problems include everything from general stability, networking issues, backward compatibility, unfinished features, unfinished APIs and more. 

 

Paul Thurrott writes "Do I think that Microsoft will finalize Windows Vista by the end of October 25? Yes, but I also believe they will release a massive series of patches between October 2006 and January 2007 if they do arbitrarily hit their latest release promise because of issues that crop up after Vista gets shipped out to all those businesses that won't be installing it anyway."

 

The fear many in the industry have of this strategy is a repeat of the Windows ME debacle. The poor reception of Windows ME essentially killed it.  An unfinished Windows Vista could result in an OS whose reputation never recovers. One can almost picture Dell and HP offering Windows XP as an alternative pre-loaded OS for years to come with Windows Vista essentially being shoved aside until the follow-on version of Windows ships.

 

As an OS, Windows Vista is a marvel. The problem isn't that the OS is bad, it is just that it needs time for some of the really ambitious features to be fully tested and integrated.  Windows Vista delivers things like DirectX 10 (which is a big deal for game developers and be only available on Windows Vista), Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, a better UI, a composited desktop environment, better security and a lot more.  Under the covers, Windows Vista is the most significant update to Windows since NT was introduced. 

 

But if Windows Vista ships too early, none of those great new features will matter. All people will remember is that it was "buggy", "slow", "flakey", and "incompatible" and that reputation would long outlive the few extra months it would take to make sure Vista has the time to get it right.

 

Below are some links that go into more detail and their prescriptions. 

 

View: Push Vista Back!

View: Vista needs a beta 3

View: Is Vista Ready?

Revised naming for Internet Explorer 7

The Internet Explorer product team today announced a change in their planned naming scheme for Internet Explorer 7 after concerns from the wider community.

In late May, a post on the team's blog stated that the name "IE7+" was to be used to refer to the version of Internet Explorer 7 that ran on Windows Vista. This was to differentiate between the differing feature set offered by Microsoft's latest browser when used on Windows XP and on Windows Vista. A backlash from the wider community ensued, many stating that such a name would cause confusion for users, particularly when it could be interpreted as "IE7 or above".

Responding to these concerns, the product team announced that the new version would be known simply as Internet Explorer 7, regardless of the operating system it was run on.  For documentation describing platform-specific features, the term "Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista" is to be used.

The move has both surprised and pleased testers of the popular web browser, which is to be released later this year.

News source: Internet Explorer development blog

Messenger Plus! Live 4.01.240 released!

Patchou has released an update to Messenger Plus! Live, that was released 3 weeks ago. This release contains the custom emoticon panel that was absent from the original Messenger Plus! Live release.

Improvments also include:

• Compatibility for the "Clean Messenger" patch
• Compatibility with MSNP14 (currently enabled when you sign-up for Yahoo! Messenger interoperability)
• The 'Quick Icons Panel' has returned
• Other minor bug fixes

Also, the old website http://www.msgplus.net now redirects to the new, http://www.msgpluslive.net site. But http://old.msgplus.net has been created in the event that anyone still needs to access the old site.

>> Messenger Plus! Live changelog
>> Download Messenger Plus! Live 4.01.240
>> View Custom Emoticon Panel

The Best of the Best: Microsoft Recognizes Top Vendors

Five of Microsoft’s vendors receive annual Excellence Awards.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the winners of the 2006 Microsoft^® Vendor Program (MSVP) Excellence Awards. This year’s five winners — Trammell Crow Co., GE Plastics, Taylor Nelson Sofres plc (TNS), MRM Partners Worldwide and Milligan Events — were selected from among more than 20,000 Microsoft vendors in the U.S.

The MSVP Excellence Awards are given to vendors that consistently provide outstanding service and results to Microsoft. A panel of Microsoft executives selected the winners, which were nominated by Microsoft employees based on value, quality, flexibility, innovation, security and privacy. Winners were announced in five categories: Vendor of the Year, Quality, Service, Technology and Value. They received their awards today during the fifth annual MSVP Annual Vendor Summit on Microsoft’s corporate campus in Redmond.

“MSVP Excellence Award winners are the best of the best among over 20,000 vendors that Microsoft works with throughout the U.S.,” said Mike Huber, General Manager and Chief Procurement officer at Microsoft. “Their hard work, the value of their services and the quality of their contributions has helped Microsoft better serve its customers and improve as a company.”

Established in 2002, the Microsoft Vendor Program is designed to both enhance Microsoft’s relationship with a select group of vendors that are critical to the company and to make it easy for Microsoft employees to work with vendors that have been pre-qualified.

The following vendors are this year’s MSVP winners:

•	Vendor of the Year: Trammell Crow. Trammell Crow, one of the largest diversified real estate services companies in the world, provides real estate advisory services, administration of global-portfolio leases, project accounting, and information technology support services to Microsoft’s Real Estate and Facilities team. In response to rapidly increasing head count at Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, Trammell Crow secured more than 3 million square feet of property in the Puget Sound area while negotiating fair-market prices for Microsoft in a tight real estate market. Trammell Crow’s impressive results were achieved by a strong, flexible team that improved all its services to Microsoft during this dramatic increase in real estate activity.
•	Quality award: GE Plastics. GE Plastics provides specialized plastics for more than 40 components in the Xbox 360™ console, controllers and accessories. For the launch of Xbox 360, GE delivered its advanced materials technologies with no production or service issues and exceeded all of Microsoft’s engineering, quality and environmental requirements. GE Plastics met this high-quality bar while significantly reducing the industry’s average lead time.
•	Service award: Taylor Nelson Sofres. TNS, one of the world’s leading providers of market information, conducts a variety of in-depth research and analysis projects for Microsoft each year. One increasingly complex worldwide study has been managed by TNS for Microsoft over a number of years, and each year TNS has improved the delivery, content and design of the ongoing project while simultaneously reducing turnaround and lowering costs.
•	Technology award: MRM Partners Worldwide. MRM Partners Worldwide, a full-service agency that provides direct and interactive marketing solutions, implemented an integrated Microsoft SharePoint® system that enabled cross-discipline integration and improved client and agency collaboration and information sharing. Subsequent to the successful launch of this new SharePoint system at Microsoft, MRM Partners Worldwide extended this solution to a number of its other clients.
•	Value award: Milligan Events. Milligan Events, a comprehensive event services company, based in Boise, Idaho, has managed more than 40 major events for Microsoft in the past year that have drawn over 150,000 customers, partners and Microsoft employees. Events that Milligan has managed this year include Microsoft Convergence 2006 and Microsoft’s global sales meeting. Milligan Events received high marks for quality and collaboration and drove significant value.

Top Internet sites in May 2006: Yahoo!, Microsoft.com, Google (not MSN)

For the first time in Nielsen//NetRatings tracking history, the top 3 Internet destinations have a newcomer. Google replaced MSN.com as the third most visited standalone site in May 2006. Microsoft.com still remained the second most visited site on the Internet, behind Yahoo!

Top Web sites in May 2006
Site	Audience, 000	Time spent
Yahoo!	105,278	3:26:27
Microsoft	98,977	0:50:26
Google	95,355	0:53:41
MSN	94,383	1:40:09
AOL	72,023	6:02:57
eBay	54,841	1:38:55
MapQuest	43,512	0:11:18
MySpace	42,010	1:46:51
Amazon	40,023	0:19:00
Real.com	38,953	0:44:51
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

SAP, Microsoft Plan Duet Roadmap

Sap and Microsoft aren't strangers to product launch delays. So it seems odd for SAP to be thinking about upgrades when it just barely got the first version out the door a month ago.

But maybe it's learning to limit its product development excesses.

SAP, along with Microsoft, developed Duet, a product that allows users to interact with SAP enterprise software through a Microsoft Office interface.

Only out a month, Duet is already in line for enhancements.

Dennis Moore, general manager for emerging solutions at SAP, told internetnews.com that the company is already discussing specific enhancements with customers and will present an extended product roadmap in the next quarter or two.

"We've been incorporating learnings back into the product and the documentation of the product," said Moore.

He added that SAP has been able to reduce implementation time by 30 percent as a result of that feedback.

The strength of Duet is that it allows knowledge workers in enterprises using SAP to interact with certain SAP applications tied to the calendar functions, such as vacation scheduling, through Microsoft Office desktop solutions.

"Duet is not porting SAP to Office. It's about extending Office to appropriate processes within SAP," Moore explained.

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Microsoft adCenter Upgrades Include Firefox Support

Microsoft adCenter has a new release launching Saturday, August 5th, and one of the upgrades includes the long awaited Firefox browser support.

Microsoft sent out an email to their premium adCenter customers, which included the following:

• Now, use Microsoft adCenter with the Firefox 1.5 browser!
• Daily, weekly and monthly data will be updated every hour to help you view results and optimize campaigns in real-time.
• Select the time frame for which you want your campaign and order summaries to show, instead of viewing them in the life-to-date format.
• User-interface changes to the reporting tab will make usability simpler.
• API customers will now have access to more procedure calls. Detailed API communications will be sent to API customers.

Full Story At Source

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Third-party Microsoft patches could get new life

It has been nearly three years since Microsoft moved to a monthly patch release schedule as a way to rein in some of the chaos that had begun to engulf its vulnerability reporting and repair efforts.

The result has been a more orderly, predictable process that enables enterprises to plan patch deployments well in advance and avoid costly downtime during business hours. And several other vendors, including Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., have followed suit by launching scheduled patch releases of their own.

But some administrators and security experts say that for all its benefits, the predictable release schedule also has its downsides, and can leave enterprises hanging when a new flaw is discovered between patch releases, which has led to a rise in third-party security fixes.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft has released what have been called "out of cycle" patches a few times since it began the monthly schedule, but typically only after pressure from customers and media reports. Those rare instances have mainly come after exploit code for a new flaw has been made available, in effect forcing Microsoft's hand.

"The MSRC will always consider releasing an out-of-cycle update if we have a quality update available and customers are at serious risk, as we have done on several occasions such as the WMF attack," said Christopher Budd, security program manager at the Microsoft Security Response Center. Continue At Source

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Debugging Tools for Windows 6.6.7.5

You can use Debugging Tools for Windows to debug drivers, applications, and services on systems running Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server codename "Longhorn," as well as for debugging the operating system itself. Versions of the Debugging Tools for Windows package are available for 32-bit x86, native Intel Itanium, and native x64 platforms.

The latest release of Debugging Tools for Windows is available for download from the web. You can also install the package from the Windows DDK, Platform SDK, or Customer Support Diagnostics CD

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PC-cillin Internet Security 14.55 for Windows Vista Beta

Looking for another Beta that’s related to your shiny new Vista Operating System-On top of that an Anti-Virus. Look no further.

PC-Cillin is running a Beta Program Till October 31^st, 2006 for their new Internet Security Anti-Virus for Vista. If you want to participate in the beta check it out here

Participants who complete the questionnaire automatically join the pool for a drawing of valuable Amazon Gift Certificates:

• 1^st Prize: USD $500
• 2^nd Prize: USD $300
• 3^rd Prize: USD $200

What have you got to loose…Check it out now

https://www.trendbeta.com/index.php?get=80

Microsoft submitted documents in bid to avoid fine

Microsoft has submitted documents required by the European Commission in an effort to avoid further fines for breaching an antitrust ruling, a spokeswoman for the European Union regulator said on Monday.

"We received the technical documentation from Microsoft. The competition services are currently analyzingit with the help of the trustee. It's too early to say whether they complied with the decision," the spokeswoman said.

Earlier this month, EU regulators fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($356 million) for defying a 2004 antitrust ruling requiring it to share key information on its office servers with rivals, and warned the company to comply or face bigger daily fines from next month.

The information is needed so rivals' servers could compete on a level playing field with Microsoft's own. Microsoft must help its rivals interconnect smoothly with Windows.

Part of the decision was based on the evaluation of an independent monitoring trustee, British Professor Neil Barrett, who was nominated by the U.S. software giant.

The non-compliance penalty imposed on July 12 was the first of its kind and came on top of a record 497 million euro fine the Commission levied in its landmark antitrust decision against Microsoft in March 2004.

That decision found that the company abused the dominance of its Windows operating system to squeeze out competitors.

Microsoft faces a further fine of up to 3 million euros a day if it found to be still not in compliance with the ruling.

"It's too early at this stage to give any indication of whether there will be another payment, another penalty, and if there is to be another penalty how much it would be," Commission spokesman Michael Mann told a news briefing.

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Vista to have inbuilt undelete

Vista will have an inbuilt undelete system based on the Windows 2003 "volume shadow copy" technology, Microsoft has revealed.

The system, called "Previous Versions" under Vista allows end-users to retrieve older versions of files as well as deleted versions.

As APC Magazine points out, the feature, which will be enabled by default in Vista, is great for Joe Cubicleworker who has just overwritten his boss's PowerPoint presentation by mistake. But it may be very bad news indeed for anyone who discreetly deletes a document and assumes it is gone.

Of course, undelete has always been possible unless a file has actually been overwritten with other data, but under Vista's versioning file system, that will certainly not happen, meaning your 50:50 chance of a file being recovered by your tyrannical boss is now a 0:100 chance.

News source: APC Magazine

Microsoft recalls Small Business Server 2003 R2

Microsoft has recalled an updated version of Small Business Server because of a glitch discovered during a regular software production audit, the company said Friday. The update, called Small Business Server 2003 R2, contained non-final versions of some core components. However, it had only been released recently to original equipment manufacturers, system builders and distributors, and was not generally available to customers, according to the company.

Microsoft is recalling and reissuing the production so far of R2. That will lead to a minor delay in general availability, the Redmond, Washington, company said. Earlier this month at its launch at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft said the product would be available in August. Small Business Server 2003 R2 will incorporate the Windows Server 2003 operating system, the SharePoint Web portal, Exchange Server groupware and Office Outlook e-mail software.

 Full Article @ Infoworld

Microsoft Details Vista Upgrade Paths

With Windows Vista nearing its first release candidate in preparation for a final launch early next year, Microsoft is providing more details about possible upgrade paths. Of note: Windows 2000 cannot be upgraded to Vista.

While Windows 2000 Professional customers may purchase a cheaper "upgrade" copy of Microsoft next-generation operating system, Windows Vista must be "clean installed," which means users will need to back up their files and data manually and then copy everything into place. Applications will also need to be re-installed.

The x64 version of Windows XP will also have the same requirement. Although the final release of Vista will include both 32-bit and 64-bit iterations of the OS, Microsoft has not designed an upgrade path for the current x64 release.

Windows XP Professional, meanwhile, can be upgraded only to the Business and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista. This is due tof eatures built into XP Pro not being added to the Home Basic and Home Premium SKUs of Vista.

News source: BetaNews