Microsoft News & Articles

  Having led the way as a smart new browser for Windows 8 users, Microsoft's faster, neater, more secure IE10 is finally available for the hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users. Windows XP folk, however, are still out of luck. 

There have been a number of new releases this week in document management, including OpenText’s customer communication management system that offers tight Microsoft integration. Xerox has also been busy with the release of ConnectKey, Novell securer’s document with new security measures, and the German national postal service enters the world of mobile apps.

Gadget hounds the world over are enjoying the yearly deluge of new mobile device news pouring out of the Mobile World Congress this week.

Further evidence that big data is going mainstream is the announcement from Hortonworks that its Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows (HDPW) is available in beta, making it the first Apache Hadoop distribution that is available for both Windows and Linux.

Way back when, in the days when Microsoft starting talking up Office 2013 critics of the Redmond giant made some pretty pointed comments about slow-coach Microsoft and the cloud. There may have been reasons to suggest that the company was behind the times with a desktop office suite, but the recent issues around licensing of Office 2013 shows exactly where it is putting its money.

 Starting off the big speeches on day one at Mobile World Congress, Nokia did some filling-in around its Lumia range, but left the high-end untouched. A shame, as rest of the show focuses on the future of mobile.

In another SharePoint related announcement this week, Socialtext announced three new points of integration between SharePoint and Socialtext, as more companies start preparing their product portfolios for the release of SharePoint 2013, expected for this quarter.

When Microsoft bought enterprise social network Yammer in June for US$ 1.2 billion, more than a few eyebrows were raised, especially since Microsoft already had enterprise social networking in SharePoint and was partnering with Yammer. Now, those same eyebrows may again be arching skyward following Yammer’s recent report of record growth last year and its plans to move toward closer integration with other Microsoft product lines.

In December we took a look at Microsoft’s Hotmail email replacement service Outlook.com to see how it was coming along. At the time Microsoft said that about 25 million people had made the jump with a lot more getting ready. Two months later, users number 60 million, the new service is out of Preview and able to scale to one billion users.

The good news for Skype users is that it’s finally getting video voice mail. The bad news: this assumes you own a Mac, or a mobile device using iOS or Android. The Windows versions look like they will be last to that party, with an availability expected in April.

The latest Gartner's Business Intelligence and Analytics Magic Quadrant portrays a mature market that has a wide variety of vendors mostly working on getting companies to move up from descriptive analytics to the next step of diagnostics.

Even if there is still no official release date, every day it seems we learn more surrounding the SharePoint 2013 release. The latest -- a recent blog from one of the people working on it that provides brief glimpse into some of the mobile features.

Even with more mobile phone choices than ever, according to a recent Gartner report, sales dropped slightly worldwide in 2012, but Samsung remained the top overall seller of feature phones and smartphones combined.

With all the discussion around customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CXM), it is hard to believe that one of the major issues facing enterprises is defining CRM strategies. According to Forrester’s William Band, this problem is compounded by a shifting CRM landscape.

SharePoint social business partner NewsGator, updated its Social Sites platform to include compatibility with the soon to be released SharePoint 2013.