Enterprise services and support

Although much of Microsoft's focus at its partner conference will be on the cloud, many of its product announcements have to do with on-premise software such as Windows and Windows Server.

On Monday, the first full day of its annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft is scheduled to announce, among other things, the beta of Service Pack 1 for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The update for Windows 7 is quite minor and consists mostly of previous bug fixes and other tweaks. On the server side, though, the service pack will add some new features around virtualization. … Read more

Microsoft has put a price tag on keeping Windows in tune.

The software giant said on Monday that it plans to charge customers $11 per computer per month for Windows Intune, a cloud-based service that lets small businesses manage and protect their computers.

Microsoft announced its plans for Windows Intune back in April, but had not yet said how much it would charge for the service when it is ready for mainstream use early next year.

Group product manager Alex Heaton said that Microsoft settled on that price based on what it charges for other online services, such as hosted … Read more

Salesforce.com hopes its new Chatter product will give businesses something to talk about.

After beta testing the collaboration service since February, the company says the product is ready for mainstream use. Although it is designed to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint or IBM's Lotus Notes, Salesforce.com aptly describes Chatter as sort of a Facebook for businesses.

Instead of following old high school classmates, though, Chatter allows workers to follow co-workers, specific business documents, or pieces of data. A sales rep, for example, could follow a pending deal and get updates whenever details on the transaction are updated, … Read more

With a high-power crowd in the audience, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went hard-core with his sales pitch on the role cloud computing will have for businesses in the coming years.

Speaking to about 125 chief executives and other leaders, Ballmer said that truly big shifts in technology actually don't happen all that often.

"The really big ones you have to totally jump on," Ballmer said during a speech at the company's annual CEO Summit, which runs through Thursday at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash. "We are, right now, all of us in the midst of … Read more

A mobile alliance between Microsoft and Nokia has given birth to its first application.

The two companies announced on Wednesday the launch of Communicator Mobile, a Microsoft app designed to run on Nokia smartphones.

Communicator Mobile will let users of Nokia smartphones tap into their corporate directories and check the availability of colleagues to determine the best way to get in touch with them--phone, e-mail, texting, or instant messaging. The app also comes with its own built-in IM client.

Targeted for the enterprise market, Communicator Mobile uses Microsoft's Office Communications Server on the back end to connect a company'… Read more

Updated 1:40 p.m. with more background and history on Microsoft's newsgroups

Microsoft said it plans to end support for more than 4,000 old-style newsgroups starting next month, pushing users instead to discussion forums such as those found on the Microsoft Answers, TechNet, and MSDN sites.

Although venerable, Microsoft said that so-called NNTP newsgroups are past their time in terms of being usable and secure.

"Newsgroups run on an outdated and discontinued platform that is no longer supported, making them vulnerable to spam and other usability issues," Microsoft said in a statement. The company said … Read more

Microsoft is trying to help midsize business keep their PCs in tune.

On Monday, the software maker is set to launch a beta for Windows Intune, a service that uses the cloud to offer management, patching, and antivirus capabilities for a company's PCs. When it launches in final form, the Intune service will also include upgrade rights for a company to move its PCs to the enterprise edition of Windows 7. It will also include the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a collection of asset management, virtualization, and other services that typically are only available for large businesses that have … Read more

A start-up has plans to turn the traditional approach to blade servers on its ear, and it's not just smoke and mirrors. But it is light and mirrors.

For the past seven years, Lightfleet has been working on a technology that employs light signals to replace the cabling and switches typically used to connect various server nodes in a blade server. And as of December, it had delivered its first unit--to Microsoft's Research's labs.

Lightfleet's first product is code-named Beacon, a 32-node server that uses dual-core Intel processors along with standard off-the-shelf disks, memory, and storage … Read more

Microsoft is ready with the final versions of its Visual Studio 2010 developer tools software and Silverlight 4, as well as version 4 of the .Net Framework.

The company is announcing the launch of the three products on Monday at a Visual Studio developer conference in Las Vegas. Visual Studio 2010 and the updated .Net Framework are now broadly available, Microsoft said, while Silverlight 4 will be made available for download later this week.

"We're excited to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2010 with developers around the world today," Server and Tools unit President Bob Muglia … Read more