The title of this entry would have rhymed had it not been for that pesky "R2" at the end. But that's kind of the important bit, isn't it? Anyway, Microsoft says that the latest version of SQL Server will be available in May, just in time for partners to start selling it before Microsoft's fiscal year ends at the end of June.
Posted by Lee Pender on January 20, 20101 comments
Just when you thought Lotus was becoming as distant a memory as Jeff Papows' term there as CEO, Big Blue and its collaboration company have come storming back. This time, the cloud is the battlefield.
This week, Panasonic ditched exchange for LotusLive, IBM's hosted e-mail system. And Lotus is also playing a key role in the launch of a collaboration-equipped BlackBerry. Suddenly, the cloud is giving way to a Big Blue sky. (OK, we'll keep working on those metaphors.)
Posted by Lee Pender on January 20, 20100 comments
After settling the long-running IE antitrust mess by compromising on a browser menu, Microsoft and European officials are going at it tooth and nail again. And, as usual, the Eurocrats are the party on the attack.
This time, though, it's just bizarre. And the Euros have way overstepped their bounds. In light of revelations that hackers used a security flaw in IE to attack Google and other firms, the French and German governments -- get this -- officially recommended that users move away from IE and employ some other browser.
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Posted by Lee Pender on January 20, 20105 comments
The two longtime, long-term partners plan to spend $250 million over the next three years on cloud and virtualization technologies. This is an important story, actually...but we're not going to tell it. We'll leave that to Jeff Schwartz, who covered the announcement for RCPmag.com here and in his blog. So, yeah, if you want to read about Microsoft and HP, you're just going to have to boost our hit count. But it's worth it!
Posted by Lee Pender on January 14, 20100 comments
Oblicore is not only a fun word to say (roll it around a few times); it's also a business-performance management vendor that measures IT performance...and now belongs to CA.
Posted by Lee Pender on January 14, 20100 comments
VMware is all up in Exchange's grill now with its purchase (from Yahoo) of open source e-mail vendor Zimbra.
Posted by Lee Pender on January 14, 20100 comments
Google's online productivity suite isn't just a nifty little tool for storing documents and spreadsheets anymore. It's wide open now -- sort of.
Google revealed this week that Google Docs will now store more than just documents (we'd call them Word documents, but that's like saying "Kleenex" instead of "tissue") and spreadsheets. The online suite will now accept and store any type of file, including photos and the like.
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Posted by Lee Pender on January 14, 20101 comments
Want to rent Windows or Office 2007 (if anybody can even legally offer Office 2007 right now)? Well, you can do it thanks to Microsoft's change of heart on rental restrictions for those products.
Posted by Lee Pender on January 13, 20100 comments
Is it safe to come out now? Forrester says it is, and that a long period of growth in technology spending is on the way. We'll see. The big target spending areas, according to our neighbors in Cambridge? Virtualization, cloud computing and unified communications. We're down with the first two, but we'd have to know exactly what UC is before we'd believe that anybody is going to buy it.
Posted by Lee Pender on January 13, 20100 comments
In a classic improvement-that-actually-made-things-harder story (hey, it's a category), Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center is...well, kind of a mess for some users right now.
Posted by Lee Pender on January 13, 20101 comments