Microsoft News Tracker

Late last week, Microsoft announced that Kirill Tatarinov has been selected as the new head of the troubled Microsoft Business Solutions group that produces a variety of software for small and medium businesses under the Dynamics brand.

(more…)

Martin LaMonica at CNET:

Computing industry heavyweights on Monday announced a plan to create a standardized way for computing resources to “talk” to each other, a move they say will lower the cost of running corporate data centers.

The initiative calls for the creation of an XML-based standard, called Service Modeling Language (SML), and its adoption in commercial products, including systems management software, hardware, and application development tools.

The companies involved–BEA Systems, BMC Software, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems–published a draft SML specification on Monday and pledged to support it in the future.

The goal of SML is to establish a lingua franca for computing resources–servers, networking gear, applications and the like–to exchange operating information, such as security requirements or performance problems.
…
The basis for SML is Microsoft’s own XML specification, called Systems Definition Model. The company has already built support for SDM in Visual Studio 2005; all future management software and future operating systems will use SML starting in 2007, Tatarinov said.

Kirill Tatarinov is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Windows Enterprise Management Division. The formal press release has more details.