Windows News & Articles

Microsoft, in an effort to gain market share amongst young companies, has announced an ambitious program that would allow certain startups to utilize their server software for free. BizSpark is the name of the new project that will, as Microsoft hopes, encourage start-ups to employ Windows-powered servers in their product offering.

To be eligible for the BizSpark program, a private company must be in business for no more than three years, have less than $1 million in annual revenue and must be referred by one of Microsoft’s partners.

Microsoft saw better days before the release of Vista — which many consider a disaster — but Microsoft is quickly trying to make amends with the development of Windows 7, commonly referred to as the operating system that Vista should have been. The Professional Developer’s Conference brought plenty of details about Microsoft’s latest operating system and we have explored the most important ones.

An integral part of Amazon’s cloud computing services is showing a sign of maturity, while adding a much anticipated element. The Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2), which facilitates a Linux server environment as a service for Web developers, has come out of beta.

Additionally, as previously rumored, Amazon.com has added an on-demand Windows Server environment to accompany the already existing OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition offerings.

From the makers of the RightFax Connector for SharePoint — among other products — Captaris offers up a new version of Alchemy, their digital document filing system. The biggest enhancement to the product? The Alchemy File Connector — able to map a Windows drive directly to the Alchemy repository.

Managing your documents just got a little bit easier.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wants more powerful software for the Web. Well, Ballmer also happens to have a corporate technological powerhouse under his direction — shouldn’t be too hard, right?

At the 2008 Professional Developers Conference (PDC2008), Microsoft will be divulging information to the world about Windows 7, but the Windows cloud-based operating system is going to be the highlight of the conference.

Microsoft’s big next-generation virtualization beast has arrived and the speculation pours forth like wine. Redmond’s hypervisor based virtualization system for x64 systems, Microsoft Hyper-V, has released to manufacturing and is available for deployment into production environments. So far, the verdict is out in regards to Hyper-V’s actual performance, but what about its implications for the virtualization market?

I was a strong open source proponent in the past, but in the past few years I’ve gotten lazy.

I primarily use Windows on my desktop and commercial office suites. To date, few open source projects have received particularly strong reviews.

There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not it can chip away at Windows’ dominance on the desktop. Though well received, these efforts are considered a bit of an “also ran.” I’ve used Linux in some way, shape, or form for something over 7 years, so I’m not exactly new to the platform.

But, having begun digging deeper into what “open source” means today, I’m compelled to state the platform has come quite a long way!

Happy news for Microsoft aficionados: Fast Extract (FACT) for Oracle now operates on the Windows platform.

FACT helps unburden large Oracle tables onto to portable flat files in fixed- or variable-length formats with supported combinations of native SQL SELECT features.

Operating SQL*Loader and SortCL alongside FACT helps with high-volume reorg, replications, migration and reporting.

Parent company Innovative Routines International, Inc. also purveys CoSort, a data manipulation package.

Those working with Microsoft Virtual Server have something grin-worthy in store: VMRCPlus is now available as a free download to the world at large.

While there wasn’t much excitement at this week’s WWDC for the Apple Fanboys amongst us, Apple did flip the script and reveal Safari for Windows.

Need some back-up? Don’t we all. Symantec Corp has just released the latest version of its Windows system recovery solution, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0.

With the introduction of the Sun Blade 6000 Family of server hardware, Sun Microsystems is hoping to make it easier for IT administrators to provide the kind of flexibility that software developers need to build truly innovative and revolutionary products.

If you thought virtualization couldn’t get any sexier, your mind is about to be blown. Last Thursday Parallels 3.0 was announced for the Mac, and the 3D gaming support it has going on is crazy-gorgeous.

Continuing a trend that began with Office 2007 and was followed by Windows Vista, Microsoft announces that the Beta 3 version of its next generation server operating system is available for download and will go into manufacturing before the end of the year.

Let’s say you’re a growing Microsoft Windows shop and your web presence has expanded to a point where maintenance has become a nightmare. You know you need a web content management system but your budget does not cover the cost of an enterprise CMS and you are just not comfortable with bringing an open source solution into your Windows shop.

What do you do?