Azure News & Articles

Microsoft must be in a mood to rename things this month. First, the company re-branded its small and medium business advertising site and eliminated Windows Live branding. Now it’s moved on to Azure. Will any of these changes have a positive impact on revenue or just result in confused customers?

Agility has announced new updates to its Web CMS platform, supporting faster editing of both content and images.

There are countless predictions swirling that the world will end in 2012. Yesterday, we might have gotten a sign of the pending apocalypse. Microsoft announced a wholly owned subsidiary, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., dedicated to advancing the company’s investments in openness, interoperability, open standards and open source.  Yes, my friends, the fat lady has sung and the end is near.

The Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure capacity is expanded by four times.

If you are a current user of Microsoft's Azure, the infrastructure and software as a service cloud technology, you already know of the worldwide outage that occurred for over eight hours on the Windows Azure Service Management Component. The glitch that brought the system down began at 1:45 a.m. (GMT) on Leap Year Day, and some have speculated this may be at least part of the cause.

We reported in October of last year that Microsoft was making the leap into NoSQL with a Windows version of Hadoop. Although several months have passed, there haven’t been any official statements from the Seattle giant regarding a concrete roadmap. We still don’t have any official details, but we do have a leaked slide.

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.