Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Services

THE mighty Microsoft marketing machine switched itself to humble mode for the Windows 7 launch today, crediting millions of beta testers with helping its development and even poking fun at the previous Windows Vista product.


Microsoft Australia managing director Tracey Fellows kicked off the low key launch at Sydney’s Maritime Museum today where, unlike previous Windows launches, nary a rock band or celebrity entertainer was on hand to liven up the proceedings.

"Windows 7 is the PC simplified thanks to feedback and input from millions of Windows users during product testing," said Ms Fellows.

James DeBragga, the Redmond, Seattle-based general manager of Windows consumer product marketing shipped in for the Sydney event added to the humility, saying, “ We are very very humbled for all the feedback so far.”

It wasn’t always so sackcloth and ashes. The high point in extravagant Windows launches was for the Windows 95 product where Microsoft hosted a crowd of several thousand in Sydney and served up everything from Barry Humphries in Dame Edna Everage mode to a choir of gladiola-waving children dressed in white and singing 'We Are the World'.

This time around it was a crowd of just a few hundred Microsoft employees, journalists, bloggers and IT retailers jammed into a small auditorium at the Maritime Museum. Social media types got a big look in with Twitterers piped in through a number of hash tags and a live video stream piped out to whoever wanted to watch.

While the launch was somewhat down market, Microsoft said it was pumping a larger advertising budget into the Windows 7 debut than previous versions and will pepper TV audiences in coming weeks with a series of ads pushing how much punter power went into its development and how easy it is to wrangle the improved user interface.

"It's good to see people laughing at all the right places in a Windows ad," said Microsoft’s fast talking consumer spruiker Jeff Putt when the ads were shown at the launch.

Mr Putt showed off some of the new features and kicked off his demo session with a potshot at the old Vista product. “I’m proud to say that from today the current version of Windows is Windows 7,' he said.

The most graphic of the software’s interface improvements is the 'shake it and see' feature where grabbing a window with the mouse and shaking it from side to side instantly hides any underlying windows complicating the display.

While Windows 7 has been available to business users for some months and 40,000 NSW schoolchildren already have it courtesy of the Rudd government’s notebooks for high schools program, today marked the consumer kick-off for the product which Microsoft hopes will repair its credibility in the software world.

The Vista product launched to business in November 2006 and has been much maligned as a resource hungry dog.

The software giant also hopes that both consumer and enterprise customers will switch to Windows 7 in large numbers.

One bugbear for consumers changing up from previous versions could be the price.

The cheapest upgrade is to Windows 7 Home Premium which is $199 ($299 from scratch) while the fully featured Ultimate is $429 to upgrade and the business-centric Professional is $399 upgrade or $449 full price.

Microsoft has chosen not to allow Australians to take advantage of the Family Pack offered in other markets where home users can upgrade three PCs to Windows 7 for just $US150 ($162), although Microsoft is offering tertiary students a cheap deal where they can upgrade from Vista or XP to Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for $49.95.

Officials said the Family Pack was being test marketed elsewhere and could be made available locally in the future.

In consumer land, the cheap and cheerful netbooks that have taken the market by storm in the last two years have mostly come equipped with the ageing Windows XP, launched way back in 2001, because Vista hogged too much of a netbook’s scarce memory and processor resources.

Windows 7 works much better on netbooks than Vista and Microsoft hopes many netbook users will switch to the new operating system.

At the launch a procession of hardware marketeers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Asus showed off new machines running Windows 7 including the first public showing ever of the upmarket and wafer thin Dell Adamo XP notebook due to launch in coming months.

It remains to be seen how swiftly the crucial business market switches over to Windows 7 although Microsoft says it has many enterprise-level commitments including one as yet unnamed state government that will switch about 20,000 seats to Windows 7.

Much of the enterprise market has stayed locked onto the tried and true Windows XP and the economic downturn has only strengthened business attachment to XP.

Asked when the first service pack for the new Windows was due, traditionally the signal for business users to begin buying the product with confidence, Mr Putt fired back that “service pack one is launched with Windows 7 today.”

Sorces : Australianit.news.com.au

Despite the fact that Microsoft has progressed in a number of ways, ever since its Windows Vista fiasco, the company's ever-enthusiastic CEO, Steve Ballmer, has projected that Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 7 operating system, scheduled for an October 22 release, is not likely to have any substantial effect on sales of PCs.


The rather low expectations from Windows 7 apparently are based on PC-sales related projections from market research firms like IDC, which expects the worldwide sales of PCs - which is the key force driving the sales of operating systems - to plunge nearly 1 percent this year.

Furthermore, the Wall Street expects that Microsoft's revenue figures for the fiscal year ending June 2010 will likely be 'flat.'

Nonetheless, a deeper analysis of the Microsoft scenario seemingly presents a brighter picture - not only has the company gained market share after the launch of its Bing search engine; it has also got the better side of its association with Yahoo; and is probably nearing a settlement of the irksome European Union antitrust problems.

Deutsche Bank has estimated that Microsoft will expectedly reap nearly $500 million in additional revenue after the Windows 7 release, even if 2 percent of the Vista users upgrade to the new OS without buying new machines. Moreover, once companies are content with the performance of the new OS, many of them will like to opt for newer machines!

Sorces : Topnews.us

I still maintain that most applications will work under Windows 7 but by reading this blog you might think that there are quite a few issues. My gut feeling is on application compatibility is will follow a sliding scale of something like:



1 year-old application - 95% will be compatible with Windows 7
2-4 year-old application - 90% will be compatible with Windows 7
4-7 year-old application - 80% will be compatible with Windows 7
8 years and older applications - 50% will be compatible with Windows 7


What drives these kind of numbers? Not hard-core scientific research but experience with thousands of applications from Windows 3.1, NT4, 2K and Windows XP.

Hence, the reference to "gut feel". That said, these estimates can be backed up by the following events;

1) In 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2) introduced a majority of the restrictions that are now in place with Windows Windows 7. Excluding the new UAC functionality, most the local registry, local hosting server machine IE restrictions were expected to cause a large issue with corporate applications with the release of SP2 - the reality was the only a small proportion of applications were affected.

2) In 2003, Microsoft released Windows XP with a new driver model and enhanced application compatibility support for legacy applications. This is the big hurdle for most developers (excluding driver developers) - if you got your application working on XP - then you are likely to get most of the application working on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. The driver developers had to pretty much start again.

3) From 2001-2002 Vendors starting delivering application installations in the MSI format moving from the early days of a few poorly constructed MSI's (some packages were just Setup.exe's within a single custom action inside an MSI) to the present where roughly 80% of applications are shipped in the MSI format. Note: an install may be released an SETUP.EXE but really is a boot-strap MSI.

4) In 2000, Windows Installer started the installation standardization process that allowed vendors and corporate IT system administrator to rationalize their application management strategies to a single deployment technology (MSI) thus removing two of the primary reasons for application installation failure;
- Non-standard installation technology
- Non-transparent installation logic

It may seem straight-forward but vast majority of application failures are due to poor application installation routines.

5) Most application in use today that were shipped pre-Windows 2000 would have been targeted for Windows NT 4 or 3.51 and may have dependencies on 16-bit components or the NT driver model. These older applications represent the greatest challenge to application compatibility on Windows Windows 7.

Source : Community.zdnet.co.uk

Microsoft yesterday announced the launch of an 'invite only' preview of Office Web Apps, the long-anticipated competitor to Google Apps. A public beta is expected to follow later this year.



The Office Web Apps Technical Preview program will include lightweight, web versions of MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, and One Note (OneNote and other apps, along with further integration with Office 2010, will be available later) and can be accessed through Windows Live.


The Technical Preview is available in English and Japanese, with additional languages to be added later.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the early Technical Preview program is designed to collect additional customer feedback prior to the broad release of the service before the official launch next year. Office Web Apps will be available for PCs and Macs and will be able to run on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, he said.

The full feature set for Office Web Apps will be available in the first half of 2010, and offered in three ways, according to Microsoft. Windows Live customers will have access to Office Web Apps on Windows Live SkyDrive. Office Web Apps will be available to Office 2010 volume licensing business customers, hosted with Microsoft SharePoint Server on-premises. Also, businesses will have access to Office Web Apps through Microsoft Online Services.

A recent study showed that around one in five organizations use Google apps to some extent. Though most of the times, this is in conjunction with MS Office, it does show that organizations are waking up to the flexibility that web-based productivity suites provide. Google's efforts have of course been hampered due to inhibitions on the part of IT managers, but a recognized brand like Microsoft Windows 7 might find getting acceptance easier.

Office Web Apps could provide Microsoft with the opportunity to knock Google out of competition in the office productivity solutions space. Of course it depends on how good a product Microsoft has created and what kind of value proposition they will be providing to consumers.

Source: cxotoday.com

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc has rolled out a new version of its Chrome Web browser and a version of the Mac browser for mainstream users will be available within months, as the company moves to double Chrome's market share.
Almost exactly one year into Google's high-profile entry into the browser market dominated by Microsoft Corp, the Internet search giant is a distant No. 4, with a market share of roughly 2.8 percent.

For Google, Chrome is more than simply a browser, but part of a grand strategy to create a new Web-based operating system that could one day challenge Microsoft control of the computer software market.

The Internet search company is readying a battery of updates, along with efforts to forge new distribution partnerships it hopes will soon make Chrome a much more significant player.

"If at the two-year birthday we're not at least 5 percent (market share), I will be exceptionally disappointed. And if at the three year birthday we're not at 10 percent, I will be exceptionally disappointed," Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson said.

He noted the internal goals are even more aggressive than doubling share every year.

A much-anticipated Mac version of Chrome, currently only available for testing, will be released by the year's end, Google Product Management Vice President Sundar Pichai said recently during the same interview with Reuters at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Version 3.0 of Chrome for PCs, released on Tuesday, brings improvements to the browser's interface, including faster performance and "themes" that allow users to customize how the browser looks.

Analysts say Chrome's focus on performance has won it fans among the technologically savvy, but say the company needs to do more as it strives to broaden the product's appeal beyond the 30 million users Google currently claims.

"For people that care about it (speed), they've already made that switch," said Forrester Research analyst Sheri McLeish. "By and large, it's a high hurdle to get people to pick-up and change technology they've been using for a while."

According to market research firm Net Applications, Internet Explorer had roughly 67 percent of the worldwide browser market in August, while the Mozilla foundation's Firefox had 23 percent and Apple Inc's Safari browser had 4 percent.

The fact that Microsoft's Internet Explorer comes pre- installed on Windows PCs is another key obstacle facing Chrome, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.

Google recently signed a deal with Sony Corp to pre-install Chrome on certain Sony PCs, allowing it to reach a potentially new pool of users. Pichai said Google is talking with all the major PC manufacturers about similar deals, although he declined to provide any details.

While the Chrome browser does not contribute any revenue to Google -- which generated nearly $22 billion in revenue last year -- the product plays an important strategic role at the company.

In addition to Google's oft-cited credo that anything that improves the online experience will ultimately benefit its Internet advertising business, Google also sees Chrome as an important plank in developing online software such as email and word processing, which it refers to as "Apps," or applications. The software is free to consumers, but Google sells enterprise- grade versions to corporations.

Sorces : reuters.com (Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Andre Grenon)

Microsoft has promised to patch a flaw in Microsoft Windows Vista and 7 that could allow hackers to take complete control of the machine.



The company was alerted to the flaw after security researcher Laurent Gaffie produced exploit code which showed how Microsoft's SMB2 network file and print-sharing protocol could be hacked to allow attackers to hijack the machine.

The exploit was initially used to bring on the dreaded blue screen of death, however Microsoft later admitted that it could also be used to remotely execute malicious code on vulnerable machines.

"An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system," says Microsoft's advisory. "Most attempts to exploit this vulnerability will cause an affected system to stop responding and restart."

Versions of Windows older than Vista do not use SMB2 and remain unaffected by the threat. Microsoft also claims that while the release candidates of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are vulnerable, RTM editions are not.

Microsoft claims it is working on a patch, but has not confirmed when it will be made available. Until then, the company is recommending that users disable SMB2 by editing the Windows Registry. If that's beyond you, it also suggests blocking TCP ports 139 and 445 at the firewall.

This latter method will also bring several important services and applications, including the browser, screeching to a halt, Microsoft admits.

The flaw is the second embarrassing vulnerability the company is being forced to deal with. Earlier in the month, Microsoft admitted it was investigating a critical vulnerability in Internet Information Services (IIS) server, after a hacker posted exploit code to the milw0rm.com site.

Sources : pcpro.co.uk ( Stuart Turton )

OPEN SOURCERERS at the Free Software Foundation are staging a demo in Boston in a bid to encourage businesses to throw away Microsoft Windows in favour of free alternatives.


Boston was of course the historic scene of a terrorist riot against its lawful government. It is unlikely the free software crowd will riot though, and any tea will just be drunk at a coffee bar with the outrageously high sales tax paid without any question or sense of irony.

The foundation is sending letters to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, warning that Windows is a threat to business privacy, security and freedom.

The campaign is based around Microsoft's release of Windows 7, which Free Software Foundation Executive Director Peter Brown describes in apocalyptic language similar to the Book of Revelations.

Brown said the demo has to do with Microsoft's approach in general and not with the specifics of Windows 7. However it is always a good time to have a public moan when the Vole pushes a new version, he told CNET.

Unfortunately for Brown, Windows 7 is getting fairly positive reviews and Linux for the desktop is starting to look a little too much like the Vole's ageing Windows XP.

Brown admitted that it could be tougher to get public support against Windows 7 than it was with Vista.

It looks like the Open Sourcerers were too busy arguing about which esoteric piece of code they wanted to install in the next Linux kernel and missed their chance to knock Microsoft for six on the desktop while all it could offer was Vista.

Now if a business wants an alternative to Windows 7 it might decide to go with Apple, which is even more proprietary than the Vole.

The letter focuses on Microsoft, but the group is also concerned about other products, including the new Snow Leopard service pack from Apple, Brown said. That is coming out this week so he felt it should get a mention too.

Sorces : Theinquirer.net (By Nick Farrell)

Long an important product for Microsoft, Exchange Server going forward will play even more of a key role in the company's plan to extend its collaboration applications to mobile devices and other software platforms.

Exchange Server 2010 will be released later this year, and Microsoft made a feature-complete release candidate of the messaging server available this week.



Exchange, which connects to the company's Office Outlook e-mail client on the front end, is one of the oldest and most successful of Microsoft's business products aside from Windows and Office. Exchange also has a mobile component through the ActiveSync protocol that allows device makers to connect to Exchange and deliver e-mail via mobile devices.

Exchange has fought a long and successful battle against Lotus Notes to become the preeminent software delivering e-mail and groupware to business customers, and Microsoft said recently that Exchange is now a nearly US$2 billion business at the company.

Going forward, the product will take on an even bigger role to help Microsoft expand its online and mobile applications strategy, as well as its plan to reach other platforms besides Windows with its software, analysts said.

Exchange Server was the first of Microsoft's business software to be released in a hosted Web-based version several years ago, and the company has since followed suit with its SharePoint collaboration, Live Communications unified-communications and Live Meeting Web conferencing applications.

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft is highlighting features that integrate its on-premise and hosted versions of the product more closely together, which the company hopes will encourage companies to begin adding hosted services to their on-premise software.

However, while hosted services can be more cost-effective for an organization, some companies may need to keep some employee mailboxes in-house for security or compliance reasons, and continue to run Exchange on premise, said Chris Voce, an analyst with Forrester Research. "For a lot of organizations, maybe a wholly hosted solution is not an option at this point," he said.

Still, being able to synchronize features like calendars and address books between the hosted version of Exchange and its on-premise version will certainly make it easier for an enterprise to create a hybrid environment that allows it to keep some of its employees' mailboxes on premise, and allow Microsoft Server to host other mailboxes, Voce said.

"The ability to make that happen -- allowing a company within their e-mail architecture to integrate a hosted solution with an on-premise solution -- is important for migration purposes," he said.

Exchange also is earning a higher profile because of the role it plays in Microsoft's mobile and cross-platform applications strategy, as evidenced by two moves Microsoft made last week.

One was a deal with handset maker Nokia to deliver a mobile version of Office applications to the latter's handsets, a move that will further drive Microsoft's strategy to deliver its productivity applications to more devices. As part of that move, Nokia also renewed its license for ActiveSync, which allows people to push their business e-mail onto its devices from Exchange.

Exchange's role in driving unified communications to different devices-- letting people access e-mail, voice-mail and communicate with each other from any device -- is definitely raising its importance as a product, said Voce.

"It's part of the growing trend toward unified communications," he said. "In my mind, Exchange has always been a cornerstone in Microsoft's strategy."

Microsoft's embrace of Apple and other platforms for Exchange also shows the company trying to branch out with the product, said Rob Sanfilippo, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. Last week Microsoft said that the next version of Office for Mac will use the Outlook client rather than the existing e-mail client Entourage, thus giving people a similar experience and the ability to sync better with Exchange for business e-mail. And Apple also licenses ActiveSync to push e-mail out to its iPhone devices.

New support in the Outlook Web Access online client for Exchange 2010, which for the first time renders e-mail in Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox browsers the same way it does in Internet Explorer, is also an example of Microsoft's intent to use Exchange to reach other platforms, Sanfilippo said.

"They're doing the cross-platform play as well to make sure Mac users and others on the Internet can use [the product]," he said.

Sorces : Pcworld.com ( Elizabeth Montalbano )