Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft news notes with a TGIF flavor:

From the More Here Than Meets The Eye Dept. - Microsoft sues Quincy to protect server farm plans:

EPHRATA, Wash. Microsoft is suing the city of Quincy to block a public records request for building plans for a data storage center the company is building.

Microsoft says the request would disclose confidential data. The city received the Open Records request from an engineering-architectural firm. The request was withdrawn in response to the lawsuit.

Regardless, Microsoft still wants a court order blocking any future requests.

And in the ever popular Pesky Crackers Category - Pirates crack Vista Activation Server:

Pirates have released another ingenious workaround to Vista’s copy protection: a hacked copy of Microsoft’s yet-to-be-released volume licencing activation server, running in VMware.

In the same vein, next Tuesday marks the joyous arrival of yet another Patch Tuesday:

Microsoft will issue six security patches next Tuesday, of which at least two will have a rating of critical. Missing from this list is a patch for a recently discovered zero-day flaw in Word: no updates are scheduled for the Office suite.

All of the patches except one will fix various issues for the Windows operating system, with one of those being critical. The sixth will be a critical patch for users of Microsoft’s Visual Studio programming application.

The zero-day exploit for Word is nasty (don’t open any Word files of uncertain provenance) and there’s another exploit for Windows Media Player that’s also under investigation.

Last but not least, here’s a puzzle from the Entertainment Section: Watch the first Vista TV ad and figure out where the hundreds of millions of marketing dollars are going. Well, at least the ad doesn’t have the Ms. Dewey problem. So far. Previous Ms. Dewey fun here.

You may recall that Microsoft rather urgently decided to make the new document formats for Office 2007 a published standard after complaints from governments and other organizations who were casting covetous glances at the OpenDocument Format open standard and the products that use it. Well, the first step in that process was completed yesterday when ”Ecma International approved Office Open XML Formats as an Ecma standard and voted to submit the new standards to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for consideration as an ISO standard through the fast-track process.” The ISO process is expected to take about nine months.

Stupefyingly, the standard is more than 6,000 pages long including all the supporting notes which rather gives credence to IBM VP Bob Sutor’s characterization of Open XML as a “one way specification:” 

Fully and correctly implementing Open XML will require the cloning of a large portion of Microsoft’s product.

…

So therefore I conclude that while Microsoft may end up supporting most of Open XML (and we’ll have to see the final products to see how much and how correctly), other products will likely only end up supporting a subset.

That means that other products and software, in practice, will NOT be able to understand arbitrary Open XML that might be thrown at them. There is just too much. Therefore they will only create a bit that they need and send that off. Send it off to whom? The only software that might understand it, namely Microsoft Office.

So this is how I see this playing out: Open XML will be nearly fully read and written by Microsoft products, but only written in subset form by other software. This means that data in Open XML form will be largely sucked into the Microsoft ecosystem but very little will escape for full and practical use elsewhere.

Needless to say, IBM voted “No” at Ecma. Of course, no matter how unusable Open XML is as a standard, the real test is whether the balky customers buy the premise and there has already been a hopeful sign for Microsoft in that regard.

The last of the big three products from the big Nov. 30 launch has been released to manufacturing according to Terry Myerson at The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog:

This morning, we signed off Exchange 2007 for release to you!

We’ve bet the company on this product. Here at Microsoft, we have over 120,000 mailboxes running in production on Exchange 2007 – exceeding our SLA of 99.95% availability. Likewise, over 200 Technology Adoption Partners and Rapid Deployment Partners have over 55,000 mailboxes in production operating within their enterprise SLA’s.

In addition to taking the time to ensure this software was rock solid for you, we’ve invested more time in documentation and deployment guidance than we have for any other release previously. Please do check it out and let us know if we’re missing something you need.

See also the Microsoft Exchange Server home page. Exchange 2007 has a number of enhancements, but the most notable new attribute is that it is for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 only.