Microsoft News Tracker

Barbara Darrow at CRN:

Starting next spring, customers will be able to get hosted CRM from Microsoft—as well as from hosting partners.

At least that’s the plan the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has now, sources said. Microsoft hopes to have hosted CRM available in the second half of 2006, with hosted Dynamics ERP likely to follow, sources said.

Well it’s next year anyway.

Howard Diamond, CEO of ePartners, Dallas, said hosted CRM is a natural for Microsoft and does not see a conflict with his own hosting business. “CRM is a funny thing. It’s the only [Microsoft Business Solutions] product that is also covered by Enterprise Agreements, so I make more money on the services than the product anyway. This is a logical evolution of the product that I need to do the service sales I want.”

Currently partners such as ePartners and NaviSite host Microsoft CRM and other applications for clients.

Thus far, Microsoft has not acted as a managed service provider except in some now-discontinued bCentral offerings, its current small-business Web hosting business and—to stretch a point—Hotmail.

The company is mum on exactly who will run the server farms and the applications, although Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates last month told CRN that it shouldn’t matter to partners. “The value-add of the partner isn’t reliant on the software running on the server on premise,” Gates said.

Because of competitive pressures posed by Salesforce.com’s hosted CRM, and IBM’s On Demand messaging, Microsoft has to offer a hosted option, sources said.

A software company offering hosted versions of their software always runs the risk of alienating partners and confusing customers. On the other hand, the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) have been less than rousing success as a straight software offering. It’ll be interesting to see how well this plays out.

Tom Krazit at InfoWorld - Intel alters server processor roadmap:

Montecito, the dual-core version of the Itanium 2 processor, will not be available in large volumes until the middle of next year, instead of the early part of next year as originally planned, said Scott McLaughlin, an Intel spokesman. While preliminary shipments of the processor are already under way, Intel decided to make a few changes to the chip in order to reach the company’s standard for “production level quality,” McLaughlin said, declining to specify the nature of the changes.

But Montecito will no longer ship with Foxton, a sophisticated power-management technology, and the speed of its front-side bus connection to memory will run at 533MHz instead of the 667MHz speed originally scheduled for the design, he said.

And top speed is now 1.6GHz instead of 2GHz.

Intel also has killed Whitefield, a multicore Xeon processor for servers with four or more processors, McLaughlin said. It is being replaced by a new processor called Tigerton that will appear in 2007, the same time-frame in which Whitefield was expected to arrive.

Tigerton processors will use a high-speed interconnect technology that will allow each processor to connect directly to the server’s chipset, McLaughlin said. Current Xeon processors in multiprocessor servers must share a front-side bus connection to the chipset in order to access data from system memory or I/O, a bottleneck that industry analysts have blamed for the current performance gap between Intel’s server chips and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Opteron processors.

The Hotfix.com says the buzz is:

- Vista Beta 2 on December 16, 2005. Release to Manufacturing (RTM) on July 25, 2006 in time for the holiday ramp.

- Office 12 Beta on MSDN in the next few weeks

- Antispyware Beta 2 in late November

Meanwhile over at Channel 9, folks are anxiously waiting for a rumored imminent release on MSDN of the gold versions of Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 which are due to be launched November 7. According to S. “Soma” Somasegar, at least VS 2005 will be available before Nov. 7 - they had the ship party on Friday.

Press Release:

ICRA, the Internet Content Rating Association, has announced today that it has signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft Corporation enabling Microsoft to utilize the ICRA system in a range of products such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft FrontPage.

Separately, Microsoft has made a financial contribution to ICRA in support of the ongoing work of the organization, including development of ICRA’s world-leading labeling system, a new vocabulary better able to meet the challenge of digital convergence, and continued outreach based on ICRA’s commercial value proposition.
…
Hemanshu Nigam, Microsoft’s Director for Child Safe Computing in Windows Client, stated:

“We are pleased to have completed this inbound licensing agreement with ICRA. Microsoft supports ICRA’s ongoing work as part of our own efforts to help provide children and their trusted guardians with a safer and more secure computing environment.”
…
ICRA encourages digital media providers to describe their content using machine-understandable labels that empower Internet and digital content users to customize their online experience through installation and use of a filter set to each user’s personal preferences. In addition to free web filters — such as ICRAplus — ICRA labels can also be read by other filtering tools, Internet browsers and search engines.

More details at http://www.icra.org/ but the net is that the ICRA provides a mechanism for RDF tagging web content for parental control purposes and Microsoft has licensed the right to incorporate/scan the tags in their browsers, Client OS, and their Office Web authoring tool, FrontPage. Presumably this would all take place in the IE7, Windows Vista, and Office 12 timeframes or later. No mention of Visual Studio, but undoubtedly it is included too.

That Microsoft Office has a “good enough” problem got another illustration in Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ review - Why OpenOffice.org 2.0 Is Your Best Choice:

There are many fancy reasons that OpenOffice.org is a great choice for your office work. For example, it’s open source and it supports an open format document standard, OpenDocument.

But let’s put “openness” to the side. Let me get down to the nitty-gritty: It’s free (as in free beer) and it works. What’s not to like?

OpenOffice.org is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats and the latest version, 2.0, “boasts an interface that’s much more like the Microsoft Office interface.”

…but let’s get back to brass tacks again. OpenOffice.org’s price tag: 0. Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003’s list price: $499 new, $329 as an upgrade.

Day in and day out office usability? For all practical purposes, they’re about the same.

So, which would you rather ‘buy?’

So what can Microsoft do to protect their lucrative Office market? Adding more minor features isn’t likely to do it. The user interface is changing in Office 12, but that can also be viewed as a minus for the retraining involved. As a result, Microsoft seems to have settled on a new theme of linkage of Office with business software products farther up the food chain such as the small business offerings or enterprise offerings via workflow and collaboration via SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Portal Server.

Building on that theme, Microsoft yesterday announced more upstream linkage - Microsoft Builds Business Intelligence Into Office Software:

Building on the robust business intelligence (BI) platform capabilities provided by Microsoft® SQL Server™, Microsoft Corp. today will announce it has significantly increased and broadened its investment in BI, with Microsoft Office products playing a major role. The goal is to provide a better experience when users access and work with business information from within the suite of applications they already use to work, collaborate and manage their business — Microsoft Office.

Decision-makers at all levels within an organization can use these new capabilities to help drive improved business performance. In support of this strategy, Microsoft will announce that a new business performance management server application, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, will be available in November. The company also will showcase technologies that will be included in the next release of Microsoft Office products, code-named Microsoft Office “12,” that are designed to help information workers easily find, analyze and more securely share business information within the Microsoft Office System, leading to faster and more informed decisions.
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Available Nov. 1, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 is a new, server-based business scorecarding application. It takes advantage of the power of the Microsoft Office System and extends the SQL Server platform to help organizations broadly deploy personalized scorecards to employees so they can track key performance indicators (KPIs) against goals — all within an intuitive and collaborative environment.
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Microsoft Office “12” will simplify the process of accessing and working with business information. Today the company unveiled the following BI capabilities that will be delivered by Office “12” Excel and Office “12” SharePoint Products and Technologies, both of which integrate with SQL Server 2005…

These improvements deliver increased value to Office users, and they also mark a shift in the delivery and use of BI solutions. Where BI has previously been an individual activity, its integration into Office introduces new collaboration scenarios.

And more reason to pay for Microsoft Office instead of a free alternative. More details by following the link and at the Business Scorecard Manager home page.

Update: Related articles -
Will New UI Secure Office Users?
Microsoft Office Isn’t the Only Office Game in Town