Microsoft News Tracker

Jason Langridge blogs the news:

I’m pleased to share that Activesync 4.1 has been released to the Web today.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/downloads/activesync41.mspx

It resolves a number of issues with Activesync 4.0 where synchronisation would not work if you used personal firewalls or network optimisation clients.

It also adds features for Windows Mobile 5.0 devices.

Build 1.0.701 is now available for download. Some details:

The latest beta refresh, build 1.0.701, extends the Windows AntiSpyware beta expiration date to July 31, 2006 and provides new signature updates to help protect against recently identified spyware.

Existing users of the beta (Build 1.0.615) will receive a software update that includes the new beta refresh. The latest beta refresh is also available for download through this site.

Microsoft would like to encourage all Windows AntiSpyware (beta) users to download and install the new update (Build 1.0.701).

Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie used a post on his blog to introduce the Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS that Microsoft is developing. A FAQ and a draft spec (released under a Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike license) provide more details, but the basic idea is to extend RSS for bi-directional data flows so that disparate applications can share data, instead of the conventional publish/read flow of RSS.

And so we created an RSS extension that we refer to as Simple Sharing Extensions or SSE. In just a few weeks time, several Microsoft product groups and my own ‘concept development group’ built prototypes and demos, and found that it works and interoperates quite nicely.

We’re pretty excited about the extension - well beyond the uses that catalyzed its creation. It’s designed in such a way that the minimum implementation is incredibly easy, and so that higher-level capabilities such as conflict handling can be implemented in those applications that want to do such things.
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At this point, various groups at Microsoft have begun to further develop their early prototypes to see what we can learn, and to ensure that the spec is sufficient. There’s nothing to announce right now in terms of which products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued. It’s time to bring the spec to you, so that you can do the same.

We’ve numbered the draft specification 0.9 because we have a good degree of confidence in its usefulness based on the prototyping that we’ve done thus far, but it’s certainly not a 1.0 and I would certainly caution against building anything ‘production’ on it quite yet.

More by hitting the links.

Press release:

PARIS Nov. 22, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry as an international standard. Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba will co-sponsor a submission to Ecma International, the standards organization, of the Microsoft® Office Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) document format technology. Furthermore, Microsoft will make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format. With Office document formats available as an open standard, customers will have even more confidence in their ability to store and manage data for the long term, with many more vendors and tools from which they can choose. The move will benefit the broader software ecosystem because software and services vendors worldwide will be able to more easily build compelling solutions that interoperate across a broad spectrum of technologies.

These global industry leaders have agreed to work together as part of an open technical committee that Ecma members can join to standardize and fully document the Open XML formats for Word, Excel® and PowerPoint® from the next generation of Office technologies, code-named Office “12,” as an Ecma standard, and to help maintain the evolution of the formats. The group will ask Ecma to submit the results of their collaboration to the International Organization for Standardization for approval.

Some commentary via Simon Taylor and Elizabeth Montalbano at PCWorld:

The development comes as a group of technology rivals led by IBM and Sun Microsystems are mobilizing a global effort to push the OASIS consortium’s Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as a global standard format for these kinds of documents.

The effort was spurred in part by a highly publicized Massachusetts proposal requiring compliance with OpenDocument for government documents, which would mean the phasing out of Microsoft Office and its proprietary format.

Microsoft has been facing increasing pressure from governments and agencies that have insisted on standards compliance for their software. Microsoft executives confirmed that the move would help the company win contracts from public authorities that want software based on open standards.
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However, a key supporter of OpenDocument and steward of OpenOffice, an open-source rival to Office, says Microsoft is using the move as an “end run” around having to support OpenDocument, which is backed by a host of vendors, including IBM, Apple, Google, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. Companies can look at ISO standards, but they can’t use them to build their own applications, says Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager of OpenOffice.org and chair of the group’s governing council.

“With an open standard, any application can use it,” he says. “With an ISO standard, it’s not quite the same thing. It just means you have a reference for it.”

It frankly seems doubtful that this will defuse the open standards complaints.

Update: A Microsoft Q&A showed up.

Press release - Xbox 360 Arrival Spawns Midnight Madness Frenzy:

Nov. 21, 2005 — In less than 24 hours, gamers and adrenaline junkies alike will converge on thousands of retail outlets to be among the first to purchase the Xbox 360™ next-generation video game and entertainment system from Microsoft Corp. Droves of dedicated fans are expected to line the streets as more than 4,500 retailers open their doors at 12:01 a.m. to answer the demand for the Xbox 360 console and 18 launch games, including “Perfect Dark Zero™,” “Project Gotham Racing® 3” and “Kameo™: Elements of Power™,” from Microsoft Game Studios.
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More than 4,500 retailers will be holding midnight madness events. Best Buy, Microsoft’s retail partner for Xbox 360 launch events, also will open all its U.S. stores at 9 a.m. on Nov. 22. “Xbox 360 takes our customers’ gaming experience to new levels,” said Jill Hamburger, vice president of games at Best Buy. “Walk into any of our stores and you’ll feel the excitement — it’s a complete entertainment solution.”

The excitement is already being felt around the globe. More than 3,500 gamers from around the world descended on an Xbox 360 oasis in California’s Mojave Desert last night to celebrate the arrival of Xbox 360 at an exclusive launch party called Xbox 360: Zero Hour. Attendees are now engaged in more than 24 hours of Xbox 360 gameplay and tonight will have a chance to buy the console, launch games and gaming peripherals on site from Best Buy.

There’s more than you likely want to know about the Zero Hour party at Xbox.com and Yahoo! news photos also has some pictures.

Update: Todd Bishop notes:

Bill Gates is scheduled to appear Monday night at a Best Buy store in Bellevue in conjunction with the Xbox 360 launch. Among other things, he’ll play Xbox games against some of the customers there. After seeing Gates dominate Conan O’Brien in one car-racing game, Forza Motorsport, at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, my advice to whoever plays him is to choose something other than Project Gotham Racing 3.

He also points to this Flickr gallery of photos from Zero Hour attendees.