Thor Olavsrud

Microsoft launched its new effort to capture opportunities in the small and medium business (SMB) market with the release of Small Business Server 2003. Microsoft unveiled the product Thursday at its annual partner conference in New Orleans. The product, a version of its Windows Server 2003 operating system that tightly integrates a number of other […]

OpenOffice.org took another step in its quest to secure a place in the office productivity suite space this week with the release of OpenOffice.org 1.1. The new version, which has been in beta since March, is an open source challenge to Microsoft’s dominance in the space, though it faces an uphill battle with Microsoft owning […]

Microsoft sent the core products in its Office System — including all Office 2003 editions and the 2003 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Visio, FrontPage and Publisher — to manufacturing Tuesday, noting the products will hit retail shelves on Oct. 21. The firm also took the wraps off pricing for Office System components.Estimated […]

Looking for a new source of applications on demand? AT&T wants to reach and touch small businesses and consumers. The telecommunication giant Wednesday launched a national trial of what it hopes will become one of the world’s largest digital software libraries. AT&T said that it sees market potential in the growing number of broadband Internet […]

On the heels of its release candidate of Exchange Server 2003, shipped early in June, Microsoft this week released the e-mail client and server to manufacturing, signaling that it will soon be generally available. The company said customers can now order a 120-day evaluation kit and sign up for an Outlook Web Access demonstration account. […]

Even consumers with several years of experience online continue to cite security and privacy features as a key factor in the decision to spend online, according to a new study by MasterCard International, lending weight to recent analysis suggesting financial institutions and other businesses stop using Microsoft’s .NET Passport service. MasterCard’s U.S. consumer study found […]

Data-compression specialist WinZip Computing unleashed a public beta of the next version of its WinZip utility for Windows this week, adding support for AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard endorsed for governmental and private data encryption. WinZip said its WinZip 9.0 beta adds the AES features to the new versions of the WinZip E-Mail Attachment Add-On […]

As Office 2003 edges closer to launch this summer, Microsoft has begun to provide greater clarity into its strategy for the productivity suite, including the reasoning behind its decision to release it in six different editions, or stock keeping units (SKUs). Only the Professional Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition will include support for custom-defined schemas. […]

Microsoft took one of the last steps toward the general availability of the newest version of its office productivity family this week when it began distributing a half-million copies of the beta 2 version of the newly rebranded Microsoft Office System. Microsoft plans to launch the Office System this summer. Formerly known simply as Microsoft […]

Microsoft is widely expected to tweak its Licensing 6.0 volume licensing program Saturday in an effort to make the program more appealing to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) which rejected the plan when it went into effect in August 2002. Gartner Group analyst Alvin Park said Microsoft began training its channel partners in the new […]

E-business interoperability consortium OASIS Tuesday said the first draft of a royalty-free data method for international electronic commerce has been released by one of its technical groups. The new OASIS schemas encompass the Universal Business Language (UBL). UBL is a standard for Extensible Markup Language (XML) document formats that encode business messages, such as purchase […]