 |
Microsoft today announced the general availability of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2.
A variety of Microsoft news items from this week that did not find a post of their own.
EU Asks Microsoft Rivals About Word, Excel Dominance:
European regulators are questioning Microsoft Corp.’s competitors on whether the company is using its dominance in word processing and spreadsheets to thwart rivals, weighing whether to open a new front in the antitrust dispute.
Danger, Will Robinson! Related: EU Extends Microsoft’s Deadline to April 23 to Answer New EU Charges on Licenses.
Yahoo ups the ante for free email with unlimited storage offer. Maybe they make it up on volume? Perhaps more importantly, they also opened up the Yahoo mail APIs to third party developers.
Microsoft warns of zero-day Windows bug. Even worse, it’s a drive-by for all Windows versions including Vista with tainted Web sites or email causing an immediate infection. The problem is due to a glitch in animated cursor handling and third parties are already releasing their own fixes while waiting for Microsoft. A fake IE7 download email is also making the rounds. I got one and was flattered that admin@microsoft.com wrote to personally ask me to download IE7 when I have been avoiding it like the plague.
Microsoft’s announcement of the Xbox 360 Elite was rather an anticlimax after all the leaks. The key point is that the targets for the Elite are the upscale gamers and home entertainment users courted by Sony with the PS3 while Microsoft disdains those “childish” gamers buying the Nintendo Wii. (That’s Nintendo you hear laughing all the way to the bank.) There’s also another opinion that the primary target is really Wall Street, but I digress. Meanwhile, Sony’s PS3 looks to be getting a new 80GB hard drive and apparently sold well after its European launch.
Zune finally got its 1.3 update and Zune market share slipped again in February.
BizTalk 2006 R2 Beta 2 will be available on Monday.
Microsoft added Netflix founder Reed Hastings to the board of directors and maintained the dividend at $0.10.
Microsoft beta tests Tahiti, yet another collaboration application, this one apparently destined for Office Live.
SoftGrid roadmap: SP1 for 4.1 expected in April/May and along with a tech preview of 4.2. 4.2 RTM and availability “some time around July.”
The PowerShell admin scripting language will ship in Windows Server Longhorn.
Microsoft Business Process Alliance Enables Mainstream Adoption of Business Process Management:
At the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Microsoft Corp. today announced the formation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (BPA), which extends the benefits of business process management (BPM) to an array of companies and offers enhanced functionality to existing Microsoft customers. The Business Process Alliance is a group of 10 industry-leading software vendors focused on making BPM solutions more broadly accessible and helping companies take advantage of BPM tools based on the Microsoft® platform. Through this alliance, a broad range of customers will benefit from a powerful set of end-to-end tools for automating and optimizing business processes. The initial members of the BPA are AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc. Microsoft also announced enhancements to its Windows® Workflow Foundation technology in the .NET Framework 3.0, adding support for the upcoming BPEL 2.0 standard and further providing capabilities and tools for developers and independent software vendors building BPEL-enabled workflow applications.
…
Microsoft also announced a road map for the adoption of the BPEL 2.0 standard in Windows Workflow Foundation to help drive industry interoperability and drive greater mainstream adoption of BPEL-enabled workflow applications. Microsoft will enable further integration between Windows Workflow Foundation and its BizTalk® Server product as part of the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 release, which will be generally available in the third quarter of 2007.
The roadmap for BPEL incoporation in Workflow comes from Microsoft’s Paul Andrew:
In March 2007 Microsoft plans to release a CTP of a set of BPEL activities for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This will be called BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP and the CTP release will implement the BPEL 1.1 specification. The final release of BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation will implement the OASIS BPEL 2.0 standard and is planned for release in Q4 of calendar year 2007.
The download will be separate from the .NET Framework and it will be required for developing BPEL based workflows in Visual Studio. The same download will provide runtime operations for executing BPEL based workflows.
…
The next major version of BizTalk Server will be built on Windows Workflow Foundation. This was announced back when Windows Workflow Foundation was first disclosed in September 2005. BizTalk Server will be able to take advantage of these BPEL activities at that time to also allow for BPEL 2.0 support. At that time both Windows Workflow Foundation and BizTalk Server will support BPEL 2.0.
Since this isn’t completely obvious, here’s the net:
What I haven’t mentioned is the role of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007 which are both based on Workflow. For information on that I recommend David Chappell’s document,”Microsoft and BPM: A Technology Overview,” which is available on the Microsoft BPM web site.
Biztalk Server 2004 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released on Wednesday. Late last month Microsoft also released a Biztalk adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. (Via Bink.nu)
Mike Ricciuti has the buzz at CNET:
Microsoft plans to launch a new hosted CRM service under its expanding Live brand next year.Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, a hosted alternative to its on-premise CRM software, is set to debut by mid-2007 as part of a revamped product code-named Titan.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, is expected to make the announcement here Tuesday at a conference of roughly 8,000 of its business partners.
The service, the third major category under the Live brand, joining Windows Live and Office Live, underscores Microsoft’s ambitions in the business software market. Company executives have said it could represent Microsoft’s next billion-dollar business.
Actually, I make it the fourth after Xbox Live, but who’s counting? There also already some major players like Salesforce.com, SAP, and Oracle/Siebel in the hosted CRM space as the article notes, so this isn’t going to be a pushover, but it’s yet another indication of the seriousness of Microsoft’s “Live” initiative.
Update: The announcement has taken place and the above article is now slightly different at the original source. Here’s the press release:
Building on the market success of Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0, Microsoft Corp. today announced the roadmap for the next major release of its Microsoft Dynamics CRM products, including a new software-as-a-service offering called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live. The Microsoft® CRM Live service will be operated and managed by Microsoft within its Windows Live™ datacenters, and will offer Microsoft’s partners another fast and flexible way to address the unique customer relationship management (CRM) needs of each customer. Microsoft CRM Live will use the same code base as the on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Microsoft CRM, a strategy that reinforces Microsoft’s leadership in allowing customers to choose the best deployment option for their business and IT needs at any time. The full range of Microsoft CRM products is part of Microsoft’s vision for business — the People-Ready Business — and the new Microsoft CRM Live service will be integrated with Microsoft’s Windows Live services and Office Live services.
Microsoft confirmed that Microsoft Dynamics CRM continues to enjoy extremely rapid growth across all segments, geographic regions and industries, and has added more than 50,000 new users in the most recent quarter. The current version of Microsoft CRM is completing its international language rollout, including a May launch in China and a launch this quarter in Japan. At its Worldwide Partner Conference 2006 in Boston today, Microsoft also demonstrated a new open-source client for mobile devices that will be available in August and reconfirmed its plans to release a new Microsoft BizTalk® Server-based integration this quarter that will connect Microsoft CRM to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and CRM applications from other vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc., SAP AG and Oracle Corp.
…
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live is planned for introduction in North America in the second quarter of 2007, and will be offered as a range of service offerings on a monthly subscription basis. There is no limit to the number of users that the system can support, but it will initially be targeted primarily at small businesses, a segment that has traditionally been underserved by the lack of flexible and cost-effective CRM solutions. Early access programs that allow partners to have access to the new Microsoft CRM Live service will begin in the second half of 2006.
There’s lots of interesting grist for the mill there, but it’s still unclear if this is really a new “Live” category or just a one-off. Also, back in March Microsoft announced a hosted version of Dynamics CRM 3.0 to be “deployed by hosting partners around the world”. Now any hosting partners who took them up on it are in competition with this new offering.
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jun | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
