Ray Ozzie was a quiet presence in Redmond, but he left deep footprints throughout Microsoft's global operation that will last for years.
Ozzie is stepping down as chief software architect and preparing to retire, according to an employee e-mail that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent out Monday.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 19, 20100 comments
Microsoft is going wild with the "president" title. Just last week, CEO Steve Ballmer took the opportunity presented by one departing president (Stephen Elop) to bestow the big title on three people. The new presidents are Don. Mattrick (Interactive Entertainment Business), Kurt DelBene (Microsoft Office Division) and Andy Lees (Mobile Communications Business). Congratulations are in order for all three of these executives, of course.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 04, 20101 comments
Microsoft is quietly building out a partner catalog in the two-week-old Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace, a beta version of Microsoft's answer to the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference in July that it would be launching the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace in September. A Microsoft spokesperson said the intention all along was to launch a beta in September, not the full-fledged portal for customer-partner connections.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20100 comments
The case surrounding Stuxnet, which some security and intelligence specialists are calling the first known precision malware weapon designed to bring down a specific real-world industrial facility, is getting curiouser.
As researchers untangled the encryption and complex code base, suspicion has grown that Stuxnet was created by U.S. or Israeli intelligence in order to disrupt a specific Iranian nuclear facility. (RCP unpacked Stuxnet's nasty implications for the Microsoft channel in a blog post earlier this week. The worm uses four zero-day Windows vulnerabilities as part of its attack.)
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20102 comments
Microsoft is supposed to flip the switch for many of the most significant elements of its Microsoft Partner Network sometime in October, a month which, you may have noticed, is upon us.
But October 2011 is shaping up as a key month for the MPN as well. In a document on the public portion of Microsoft's Partner Portal called "Prepare for the Microsoft Partner Network," the year-ahead month crops up several times.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20101 comments
Microsoft this week is introducing a sensible addition to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite -- an uptime dashboard.
Called the Microsoft Online Service Health Dashboard, the online display shows the status of various BPOS components in green (good), yellow (slow) and red (down) icons. A Microsoft screenshot of the dashboard shows the tool monitoring subscription services including Exchange Online Mailflow, Exchange Online Outlook Connectivity, Exchange Online ActiveSync, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, Hosted BlackBerry, Outlook Web Access, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting. The tool also monitors BPOS administrative services, and partner-specific cuts of data are available.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20100 comments
An odd thing has been happening in the Microsoft channel over the last few years. Every Microsoft partner we ask tells us they're getting less marketing money and other direct investments from Redmond than they got in the past. Yet every year, the amount Microsoft says it invests in the channel goes up.
After the Worldwide Partner Conference, we thought that maybe this year Microsoft had given up on the storyline of ever-increasing partner investments. The usual bearer of the good news, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner, didn't mention partner investments in his WPC keynote, sticking, instead, to data points about research and development investment. (He said that could reach $9.5 billion in Microsoft's FY 2011.)
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 30, 20100 comments
Over the last week, security researchers have revealed progress in untangling the fiendishly complex encryption and massive code base of the Stuxnet malware -- and what they say they've found is one of the most interesting developments in the computer security landscape in years.
The Christian Science Monitor online newspaper last week reported, "Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world -- to destroy something."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 27, 20102 comments
I was gearing up to jump down Microsoft's throat late last week after I saw Twitter traffic from Microsoft partners reporting that they were getting error messages when trying to use the new Internet Explorer 9 beta on the Microsoft Partner Portal. To quote Wayne Beekman's tweet early Thursday, "Installed #IE9 and @microsoft Partner Member Center Page will not load …"
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20100 comments
The Forbes 400 list of the Richest People in America came out Wednesday and it lists Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on top once again, with $54 billion. As Forbes puts it, "The software king is not the world's richest man, but that's because he is the most generous person on the planet: To date he has cut checks totaling $28 billion."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20100 comments
It appears that the Windows Intune Beta 2 was pretty popular.
In a blog post this week, Alex Heaton, group product manager for Windows Intune, announced that Microsoft is no longer accepting new users for the Windows Intune testing program, which entered the Beta 2 phase on July 12.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 20100 comments
It's an exciting time for the Microsoft Small Business Specialist Community. The testing and rollout phase of a new version of Windows Small Business Server always promises new opportunities, but this year, Microsoft is experimenting with different formats for the product.
Microsoft released a public preview on Tuesday for the next version of SBS, code-named Windows Small Business Server "7." The product itself is the basic update that usually follows an upgrade of the underlying server. In this case the upgraded server is Windows Server 2008 R2.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 22, 20100 comments