A couple of months ago, RCPU brought you
the
tale of Avistar
, a maker of video-conferencing software that was facing
potentially fatal challenges of 29 of its U.S. patents from none other than
Redmond itself.
Back then, we held -- as we do now -- that Microsoft was just trying to put
a struggling company out of business and snake its stuff in order to bolster
Redmond's own growing unified communications capabilities. Of course, not
everybody shared our take, but we've stuck with it.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 03, 20080 comments
Along with pretty much everybody else in the world, your editor got a live
demo last week of Microsoft AX 2009, one of Redmond's Dynamics Enterprise Resource
Planning suites, which is
generally
available this week
.
Other bloggers and commentators have mentioned how the latest version of AX
looks like a showcase for the Microsoft technology stack (which it
does indeed, Mary Jo Foley) and how AX might be moving Dynamics closer
to SAP's market territory -- something we've suspected and written about
for a while now.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 03, 20080 comments
RCP
Editor in Chief Scott Bekker says that Dell's latest earnings release
shows that the one-time direct-sales stalwart is still approaching the channel
with hat in hand
.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 03, 20080 comments
It seems as though the acceptance of Office Open XML as a standard isn't a
done deal yet -- at least, not if South Africa has anything to say about it. Excellent
write-up on this topic
here
.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 29, 20080 comments
Apparently he'll still
spend
20 percent of his time
working for Microsoft. No doubt he'll schedule everything
in Outlook, or maybe even Microsoft Project. Wouldn't it be funny if he carried
nothing but a paper calendar, though? Well, we think it would be.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 29, 20080 comments
So, we
asked you recently
what you were doing with virtualization...and you responded! Let's not waste
any time on this one. Here are a couple of your e-mails:
Jack writes to us from your editor's home state of Texas:
"We here at Clarendon College campuses in Clarendon, Pampa and Childress,
Texas are using it on every system in our IT lab. We are looking into running
a server-distributed solution for a virtual machine image for each of about
15 separate courses with all pertinent OSes included. Classes such as A+ classes
would have availability to Linux and Mac VMs as well as Win9x, 2K, XP and
Vista to compare during lab work and instruction. I haven't found an Ubuntu
image workaround for VMware on XP Pro host yet, but I think I will by mid-July
when we need it. I haven't been successful with Virtual PC and Ubuntu, either.
I also need a cheap version of Mac OS X to study, as well. Our networking
and infrastructure class images need to use MS Server 2008 and 2003, as well
as AS400, NetWare and Apple. As we are still in the development stage, I do
not have enough licenses except for Microsoft OSes (MS has been VERY good
to us here -- think Dreamspark and MSDNAA). We have decent host hardware,
but the challenges seem to be in the software realm. If we stay with Microsoft
products, this is EASY, though we are hoping for some cross-platform operation
as well.
"As we work through these lab settings, we are also setting the stage
for our Enterprise as well, but that is another story. Dummy terminals and
'virtual bubbles' appear to be in our near future across the organization."
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 29, 20080 comments
A few years ago, soccer legend Diego Maradona, seen
here
scoring the infamous "Hand of God" goal in the 1986 World Cup (sorry,
English readers), was in ill health -- gravely ill, many reports said. As he
lay in a hospital bed in Buenos Aires (as best we can remember; it was in Argentina
somewhere, anyway), huge crowds held a vigil outside the building and waited
for any scrap of news that supposedly came from Maradona's bedside.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 28, 20080 comments