Windows Azure News & Articles

Danish based Composite C1, Microsoft's top ranked open source web content management system, announced today full support for cloud hosting through Windows Azure, allowing users to easily gain the benefits of scalable global hosting, increased security and low cost. 

Countless industry studies have been published confirming something many of us already know -- content volume and diversity are increasing rapidly in organizations of all sizes. This rapid expansion along all dimensions is driving enterprises to adopt content management solutions to gain better control and visibility of their information. Increasingly, many of these organizations are selecting cloud-based platforms to flexibly handle content growth without the complexities of managing a highly available environment. Microsoft hopes that at least a portion of this growing market will select Azure to power their deployments. Will they?

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.

Web CMS Kentico is ready to unveil its next major release, having just released the beta, with an enterprise marketing solution as the major feature.

You knew it was coming, they blogged about it. DotNetNuke (news, site) has announced the official release of DNN 6.0. The first thing that will catch your eye -- the new interface.

Many organizations are starting to consider moving their applications to a cloud platform. For those interested in how to work in the Windows Azure cloud using web content management platform Sitecore, here's a look.

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.

The latest release of Telerik's (news, site)  web content management system Sitefinity is now supporting Windows Azure and touts a number of performance enhancements to boot.

Earlier this week -- during the Amazon EC2 outage -- Forrester Research released its report "Sizing the Cloud," which projects the size of the cloud and its various xxx–as-a-service segments between 2011 and 2020. According to the report, the world market for cloud service will expand from $40.7 billion in 2011, with a little over half, $21.2 billion, from public cloud services, to greater than $241 billion in 2020. Do you think EC2-gate makes them want to do one more editing pass?

Microsoft (news, site) announced new Windows Azure features and cheaper pricing options in hopes for being a stronger competitor against Amazon Web Services’ (news, site) EC2 cloud offering.

In the latest news from Alterian (news, site), there's not one, but two buzzwords: Web Engagement Management (WEM) and cloud.

The official launch of the Windows Azure (news, site) cloud is now upon us. It's been in the works for a few years, and well tested -- even if Microsoft does not fully utilize it themselves.

Microsoft may not be first to the cloud, but they are making every effort to become the best option. It certainly helps that companies like Automattic are plugging Windows Azure (news, site).

Microsoft has just released the latest version of their Web Platform Installer and Web Application Gallery.

The beta for version 2 has been out since March, adding a community version of PHP and ASP.NET MVC 1 to an already full list of applications. New web applications that could be downloaded included Umbraco and Silverstripe Web CMS.

With today's release of the WPI, you will also get the Windows Azure SDK to get you started on those cloud-based applications and the IIS Media Pack.

Some of the latest additions to the Web Application Gallery include learning management system Moodle, Sitefinity web content management and Kentico Web CMS among many others.

If you were nervous about installing the beta version of WPI 2, you don't have to wait any longer. This is definitely an easy way to get your development environment up and running and a version of your favorite open source Web CMS to start developing your web applications.

SQL Data Services (SDS) has been on the radar since MIX08, when it was first announced as an online data storage and query processing service that could be accessed using the standard internet protocols. It has come a long way since then. At MIX09, Microsoft demonstrated some of the newest capabilities of SDS -- specifically its new relational database capabilities.

That's right, Microsoft will offer a relational database in the Azure cloud.