Partners! In case you missed one of about a billion Microsoft e-mails you must
get every month, here's a tip for you: You can now participate in an
evaluation
of the latest release candidate
of Windows Server 2008. Our first comment
in the evaluation? "Change the name back to Longhorn."
Posted by Lee Pender on 11/01/20070 comments
It's all butter cookies and, uh, Danish, we suppose (if Danish -- as in the
sweet, sweet pastry -- is actually Danish, unlike french fries, which aren't
French) this week at Euro Convergence in Copenhagen. (OK, so the only other
thing we can think of when we hear "Copenhagen" is chewing tobacco,
which just sounds so much less appealing than cookies and pastry -- or even
fries. But go with whatever you like. Just use the spittoon, please.) And just
as we've had from Microsoft at prior Convergence get-togethers, we've got messaging
about the four disparate Dynamics suites cozying up to each other in some way.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/25/20070 comments
Redmond
magazine contributing editor Mary Jo Foley has a report on what
Microsoft is doing to get consumers to
buy
Vista for the holidays
. So far, the answer is...not much of substance, actually.
But we are kind of looking forward to Steve Ballmer's appearance in
Vogue
.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/25/20070 comments
Mr. Ellison usually gets what Mr. Ellison wants (right, Siebel and PeopleSoft?),
but the Napoleon of the software industry
hasn't
managed to pillage BEA
yet. He's still on the warpath, though, and it wouldn't
surprise us to see BEA fall into Oracle's hands before this little drama is
finished.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/24/20070 comments
Microsoft
introduced
Mobile Server
this week, hoping to pick BlackBerry's position in the "smartphone"
market. And, by the way, we'd like to thank Research In Motion for naming its
product BlackBerry and giving us all these great fruit references to use in
RCPU. Now let's see whether Mobile Server turns out to be a lemon. (See? It
just never stops.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/24/20071 comments
Maybe you missed Microsoft's introduction of a
Web
site for medical records
, which the company announced last week. If you
did, that's OK -- it wasn't in the newsletter, so it won't be on the test.
Health care, though, is a great big ol' booming business, chock with profits
for partners who know how to take the temperature of the market and prescribe
some implementations for customers. (Health care metaphors never fail!) Rich
Freeman has a
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/12/20070 comments
Your editor will be out next week on vacation, eschewing cell phone, computer,
online news aggregators and quite possibly even television. Filling in will
be
RCP
Editor in Chief Scott Bekker who, like David Letterman on the
old "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, always does such a wonderful
and entertaining job of spelling the regular host. Fortunately, unlike the great
Johnny Carson, your editor is not currently dead and will return with a new
edition on Oct. 23. In the meantime, please welcome Scott into your inboxes.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/12/20070 comments
Let's rip right into reader e-mails in this Friday edition. The big news this
week was SAP's planned buyout of Business Objects (say it as a subject and verb,
and suddenly it's a pretty funny name), which had us
pondering
whether Microsoft might make
a big business intelligence purchase of its
own.
Peter, who would certainly have Gold E-Mailer status by now if we had such
a thing, says that BO makes a lot of sense for SAP...but that Microsoft has
bigger things to worry about:
More
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/12/20070 comments
Keith Ward brings you
Part
2
of his already popular list of the most overlooked features of Windows
Server 2008.
Posted by Lee Pender on 10/11/20070 comments