Microsoft News & Articles

With smartphone sales booming, the latest research shows Samsung and Apple leaving the rest of the pack standing. A trend that could leave Microsoft and BlackBerry in the wilderness, before they even launch their next-generation products.

Bing has relaunched with a series of major changes, adding context and social elements to its new results page and a firm emphasis on "pure search." The roll-out will happen over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms names Syclo, SAP and Antenna as leaders in mobile application development platforms, while Apple, Google and RIM fall in the niche players category.

Quite a bit of movement this week in GRC, including the release of the upgrade to SAS’s GRC solution, the acquisition of BWise by NASDAQ OMX, Microsoft patches up another bunch of vulnerabilities, Clearwater expands its reseller program and Daegis offers free tools for calculating e-Discovery costs.

It seems like only yesterday that we were shouting about the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. In fact, it is just about two years ago (May 12, 2010) that it was released. And with a mere two years on the market, we’re starting to shout about the release of the next edition -- SharePoint 15.

Global No. 3 communications service provider, Telefonica has had enough of users going with Skype and other solutions for off-network communications. It now offers its own app, TU Me, for iPhone users to chat, share and message, with Android support coming soon.

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?

This week, there have been a number of interesting releases, including haromon.ie’s app for document collaboration for SharePoint accessible on iPad, Halcyon has updated its document management software for IBM i, Sertifi is offering free e-signing in Salesforce and Accusoft offers cloud capture for Silverlight.

Since Colligo released Colligo Briefcase Enterprise for iPad in December, it has been putting a lot of effort into developing it as more enterprises take iPad on board. In February it introduced Colligo Briefcase Pro, adding extra muscle. Now it has released v2.0 with added functionality.

Microsoft has renamed its small and medium business (SMB) targeted Microsoft Advertising to Bing. The company hopes the move will boost sales by giving advertisers a cue that they are buying traffic on Microsoft’s search engine. Will it make a difference?

If it's time for a change, we've got a shopping list of hot jobs for you to browse. Our bi-weekly featured jobs list is a great collection of opportunities spanning specialties and continents. Here's who's hiring this week (and if you're hiring, post your open jobs here).

Earlier in the week, we took a look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Customer Service Contact Centers and found that business applications for the customer service and support (CSS) were obsolete in many cases. Today we will take a look at the companies that made it into the Leaders Quadrant.

There is no question about the dominance of Apple in the tablet market. With Google's Android lagging in second place, everyone else is in the minority. But a recent deal between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble might turn Windows 8 into a major contender in the tablet and e-reader market soon.

This week, Facebook took further steps to secure its users by teaming up with McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and Sophos to offer better protection, which is probably good in light of the new Symantec Internet Security Report. Also this week, TEAM and EntropySoft get together for compliance with Oracle email management, while CDS and Tactical get together to offer e-Discovery services.

The release this week of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, which ties in with this month's theme at CMSWire of mobile CRM. In this report, though, Gartner finds a market that is conflicted and fragmented, developing slowly and where business applications for the customer service and support (CSS) function are largely obsolete.