Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006 has morphed to Microsoft Office Accounting 2007, but it still has the small business flavor. Richard Morochove has the details at PC World:

Microsoft on Monday released a public beta of the next version of its small business accounting software, adding useful integration with the popular online selling, payment, and credit advisory services eBay, PayPal, and Equifax. You can download the beta of Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 from Microsoft’s site. Be prepared to wait, even if you’re on broadband, and don’t bother if you’re on dial-up: It’s a 370MB file.

The program has undergone numerous modifications, including a name change, since its formal debut last year as Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006. I took a look at the beta before it was released.

Hit the link for the beta review, but the integration with online services seems to be rather slick. No word on the final release date.

Press release:

Digital Resolve, the authority in transparent risk-based authentication, announced today a formal data provider agreement with Microsoft to provide data feeds from Digital Resolve’s Trusted ServerTM Technology. These new feeds will help provide real-time, front-line protection for consumers against phishing attacks. Introduced in July 2005, Microsoft Phishing Filter helps protect millions of customers from phishing scams when they are browsing the Internet and is available via the new Windows Live Toolbar, which launched in final release last month, in Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP Service Pack 2, and in Windows Vista, both currently in beta testing.

“We were impressed with the quality of Digital Resolve’s data feeds, and they have become an important addition to our rich network of data provider partners,” said Alan Packer, Product Unit Manager of the Anti-Phishing Team at Microsoft Corp. “This agreement underscores Microsoft’s goal of employing a broad range of data sources from both third parties and end-users to help protect customers from the threat of phishing.”

Microsoft’s Phishing Filter URL reputation service is part of the innovative Phishing Filter feature that will be available to millions of users of Windows Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Live Toolbar.

The new data feed supplied to Microsoft as part of this new agreement comes from Digital Resolve’s Trusted Server Technology which provides consumers with real-time, positive assurance that they are at a valid website. The technology utilizes patented data mining capabilities, which were developed in 1999 as the core building component of the company’s patented IP Intelligence technology, to crawl the Internet 24 x 7, verifying the authenticity of financial services and e-commerce websites. This information is constantly monitored and updated within Trusted Server, which can be fed to web browsers and other desktop applications to safeguard consumers against rogue websites and protect the brand of legitimate online businesses.

This approach is a “whitelist” alternative to blacklisting known phishing sites as they pop up. There are more details from Matt Hines at PC Magazine.

On Friday he was congratulating the Vista team on the release of RC1, but today Brian Valentine is Amazon-bound:

Brian Valentine, the Microsoft senior vice president in charge of Windows development, is leaving to join Amazon.com, a company representative said in an e-mailed statement this afternoon. It’s a major departure, but it might not qualify as the biggest surprise: Microsoft had said in August that it planned to reassign Valentine to another area of the company after Windows Vista was released. Senior Vice President Jon DeVaan was brought in at the time to ultimately assume Valentine’s role.

We mentioned that rearrangement here. Valentine will start at Amazon in mid-September.

Update: More at the Seattle Times.

Following last week’s release of Release Candidate 1 of Windows Vista to selected testers, Microsoft has thrown the doors open with a Customer Preview Program (CPP) and also calmed the speculation over Vista pricing. Press release:

Microsoft first made Windows Vista RC1 available to a small group of technical customers on Friday, Sept. 1, and plans to broadly release the code to current Windows Vista Customer Preview Program (CPP) participants this week. In addition, Microsoft will reopen the CPP, a popular pre-release testing program, to new enrollments in coming days. In total, Microsoft plans to make Windows Vista RC1 available to more than 5 million customers worldwide.
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Microsoft is broadening the scope of the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program, which began last quarter with the release of Windows Vista Beta 2. The CPP enables developers and IT professionals who do not have access to Windows Vista RC1 through other channels to obtain the code and begin testing. Also as part of the CPP, technology enthusiasts are able to obtain pre-release code and begin testing the various consumer scenarios Windows Vista enables. Current CPP participants are scheduled to have access to the RC1 code beginning this week, and Microsoft will be opening the CPP program to new participants in the following days. Microsoft will post RC1 to its MSDN® and TechNet Web sites for subscriber download, and is working with publishers in various markets around the world to distribute RC1 DVDs to readers of a number of technology publications.

Not unexpectedly, Microsoft is pushing partners to test up a storm and ISVs to make sure their applications will run on Vista or even better get the “Certified for Windows Vista” logo that we have mentioned previously.

As for the pricing, all the details are now embedded in the Vista product pages, and it’s only very slightly different from what Amazon had posted, but here’s a table:

There’s no official word on availability or on the “Additional License” prices that Amazon posted.