Azure News & Articles

This week in the document management space, OpenText extends its offerings on the Azure platform, we find that document security is still an issue with SharePoint users, Box gets easier email management, Kofax extends its document capture abilities, Zylpha offers secure document transfer and SmartSoft offers OCR.

 Microsoft has been taking big steps to make its cloud platform, Windows Azure, more attractive. Just last week the company announced support for several popular open source development tools including Node.js and Hadoop. It seems that the company is intent on ensuring that Windows Azure remains the leading choice for Microsoft-based cloud services, but the company shouldn’t get too comfortable on its throne. VMWare and little-known Tier 3 have stepped forward to provide Microsoft a little competition. Game on, Azure.

Microsoft is taking big strides to make its Azure cloud service more attractive. The company has announced several updates to the platform aimed at improving its usability. The company, which has long been criticized for a less-than-friendly stance on open source, is continuing to show that giants can change. Several of the recently announced updates improve support for open source development on Azure.

Microsoft has released its server roadmap and all paths lead to the cloud. It appears that although the company will continue to sell on-premise products, it really wants customers to move to cloud-based products.

Ektron kicks off its Synergy conference in Las Vegas today with some big platform news. What's more interesting to you -- the new Digital Experience Hub (DXH) or the Azure edition?

Microsoft is putting more of its home-grown apps into the cloud, as it improves the capabilities of the Windows Azure cloud platform. Enterprise users can expect Photosynth and Dynamics NAV to be on the Azure platform, along with several other Enterprise Resource Planning apps that will follow by 2012.

Yesterday was the final day of the SharePoint conference. I chose to attend a morning session lead by Jeff Fried, CTO & VP of Engineering at BA Insight and Guy Mounier, Co-Founder & CEO of BA Insight. This session is a vendor-sponsored session, which means that the vendors are free to discuss their specific products and tools. I have worked in the past with previous versions of BA Insight and I was curious to see what they had in mind for working with Office 365.

The ASP.Net CMS from Kentico is now ready for a major refresh. With a successful beta hot off the server and over 100 pages of improvements and changes, the company is now shipping its new product.

With the release of Office 365 and all Microsoft’s talk about the cloud and its potential, it was striking that many of the cloud migration tools for MS cloud products recently have been from third-party vendors. However, Microsoft has announced the release of Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.0 that appears to be redressing that balance.

With companies such as IBM and Oracle now targeting the Big Data space, it seemed like Microsoft had been dragging its heels. Not so. Duriing the week at its Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, it announced a set of tools and services built around the Azure platform that will redress the balance.

Fujitsu (news, site) and Microsoft have announced the first production release of the Windows Azure Platform appliance. Fujitsu's Global Cloud Platform (FGCP/A5) Service, running at Fujitsu's Japan datacenter, is currently in test deployment and is expected to launch by August 2011.

Today Microsoft opened its doors to MIX11, a web/mobile industry conference with heavy emphasis on Microsoft development tools and related standards. This was my first visit to the conference and I came to the opening keynote expecting to hear the gospels of Silverlight, Windows Phone and Windows Azure being preached to me, but that (almost) didn’t happen at all.

This week, Microsoft has announced details of its upcoming Service Packs for Office on PC and Mac, Perceptive’s ImageNow integrates with Dynamics AX, Motive’s Cloud Vault is launched on Azure, Kofax releases Express 2.5 and Nuance releases its new PDF Connector.

We knew it was in the works, but now it is official. Microsoft has welcomed web content management provider Kentico (news, site) in the Windows Azure family of supported products.

Microsoft has over 400,000 partners world wide. But they don't all get a room with a view on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, WA. Fortunately for Sitecore (news, site), they do.