Microsoft News & Articles

Long have there been rumors of a deal between Apple and Google to keep Google as the default search engine on iOS devices. According to Scott Devitt in a recent investor report, One Morgan Stanley analyst has pegged that deal as one based on a per device sold basis, and it could be worth US$ 1 billion this year alone.

This week in the document management world, the build up to the release of SharePoint 2013 continues, but governance is still an issue. Meanwhile, Laserfiche has added cursive scanning through Parascript, OpenText appoints a new CMO, Hannon Hill upgrades to v7.2, while Nuance also upgrades its scanning capabilities.

In the not too distant future, I predict SharePoint will disappear altogether. It might take a year, maybe a little longer. But at some point soon it will be gone.

Malicious Flash Player content has been circulating, and Adobe has responded with an emergency security update for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and various browser systems.

In the monthly race for search queries worldwide, Microsoft’s Bing search engine was beaten in November and December by… Yandex. If you’re asking, “What is Yandex?”, you obviously do not live in Russia. 

  Despite having its launch event cancelled due to Blizzard Nemo, Microsoft managed to get people queueing for its new Surface Pro tablet. But, poor stocks left many users frustrated according to reports. 

The buildup to the release of SharePoint 2013 continues. One of the issues that was widely discussed around the 2010 release was governance and SharePoint environments. This time, with so much more data under the bridge -- and more and more people using SharePoint -- governance will be certainly be a hot topic once again.

It has been almost a year and a half since we looked into the land of the zombie apocalypse, and the infection is spreading. At the last briefing, the focus was on the endangered species known as enterprise CMS vendors. Current events reveal that the paid software industry as a whole is experiencing an accelerating disruption causing a litany of existential questions.

Back to SharePoint 2013 and the upcoming release. We have already looked at a number of improvements that look set to make it considerably better than previous editions, but the advanced localization abilities that have just been outlined in the SharePoint blog could end up being a top selling point to companies with a global outlook.

The information world is clamoring for better access to information of all types. Given that what comes out of the delivery pipeline depends on the ability of functions across the entire content life cycle -- design, authoring, identification, management and delivery -- to work efficiently, significant shortfall in any function is cause for concern. 

Yesterday, we noted in our post on the buyout of Dell by its CEO Michael Dell and Sliver Lake, a technology investment company, that it wouldn't be long before others tried to make hay out of Dell's problems. This morning we see that, in record time, one of the first companies to do so was HP. 

Deal of the year and sign of the times, Dell has announced that it is to go private in a US$ 24.4 billion deal that sees the company partially back in the hands of founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell, and partially in the hands of technology investment firm Silver Lake.

Things are heating up in the document management space. This week, we see Nuxeo setting up its stall for the coming year, vendors and enterprises are gearing up for the release of SharePoint 2013, Micro Strategies connects SharePoint and IBM Connections and Atiz introduces a mobile scanner.

 While HP's Pavilion Chromebook is effectively one of Google's low-spec PCs cased in the usual Pavilion stylings, the message to Microsoft is clear, 'You aren't the only game in town.' And with Chromebook sales on the rise, it could be a smart move as Google's OS gains momentum.

In the past week, Microsoft released a new version of Office 2013 and a new home subscription version of Office 365. The next big release will be the general release of SharePoint 2013, even if we still don’t know when. To help companies that are planning to move to SharePoint 2013, or migrate from an earlier version, Dell has put together a few tasks that should get you into the right planning mode.