Pc News

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Microsoft Targets Vertical Markets in the Enterprise

Microsoft wants to make its Dynamics business applications more immediately relevant to customers in five vertical markets--manufacturing, distribution, retail, services, and the public sector.

The vendor is due to announce its Dynamics Industry Solutions initiative Monday at its Convergence conference in San Diego.

Expanding ERP
Microsoft will build in additional vertical capabilities to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications through a combination of internal development, small-scale acquisitions, and a deepening of its Industry Builder partner incentive initiative, according to James Utzschneider, general manager of Dynamics marketing at Microsoft. Future industry-specific offerings codeveloped by Microsoft and its partners can be stand-alone offerings or software developers can build on top of them, he said.

Utzschneider doesn't see the vendor's increased vertical interest as an issue for its existing partners. "If anything we're strengthening opportunities for our partners," he said. "We're clarifying where we're going to play."

Previously, Microsoft tended to rely on its partners to add on industry-specific functionalities to its Dynamics software.

That situation was problematic for customers in particular industries, according to Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Those users were largely dependent on code developed on top of Dynamics often by very small software vendors and that code wasn't backed by Microsoft. Going forward, users will have a better comfort level around guarantees of Microsoft and its partners working together.

Early Alliances
As an example of the kind of relationship Microsoft will engage in around specific industries, Utzschneider pointed to the strategic alliance the vendor recently struck with public-sector information management software vendor Tyler Technologies. With its headquarters in Dallas, Tyler has more than 6000 customers, mostly in the U.S. local government sector. The company has 1500 staff and annual revenue in the order of $200 million.

In January, the two companies announced they'd work together to jointly develop public-sector accounting functionality for Dynamics AX suitable for out-of-the-box use by governments worldwide. The enhanced version of Dynamics should appear in the latter part of 2009, according to John Marr, Tyler president and CEO.

Government users require specific functionality in areas such as fund accounting and grant management, he said. They often choose general-purpose applications and then bolt on public-sector specific capabilities. The software would be much more useful and easier to deploy if such functionalities were designed into the applications, Marr added.

Tyler talked to Microsoft about working together for a number of years, but found it challenging to define a relationship that would prove beneficial to both companies, he said. Following the alliance, Tyler became a Microsoft reseller and hopes teaming up with the software giant will help it attract more international customers.

Marr welcomed Microsoft's industry-focused move. "They're now saying, 'Be a part of our development team,'" he said.

Certification, Tools Planned
Microsoft also announced Certified for Microsoft Dynamics, a certification program for independent software vendors, to give customers a better sense of the 3000-plus software offerings in the market and their compatibility with Dynamics as tested by third parties.

Another new offering is Dynamics Sure Step, a combination of templates and models on how best to configure and deploy the applications. Microsoft previously lacked such a standard implementation methodology and relied instead on models developed by its partners, Utzschneider said.

The vendor has spent the last year and a half working on Sure Step based on the implementation experiences of its customers and partners. Having a standard methodology in place should make it easier for Microsoft to train up new partners and consultants who don't have previous experience with Dynamics.

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Microsoft Boosts Convergence

Connectivity is a key theme running through Microsoft's Dynamics development work as the vendor begins to meld its disparate business applications families into more of a single integrated platform.

Microsoft is due to release a flurry of announcements Monday at its Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego. "It will be the biggest news day we've ever had," said James Utzschneider, general manager of Dynamics marketing at Microsoft.

Pushing Partnerships
At the heart of the Dynamics announcements will be the vendor's attempts to improve different levels of connectivity, for instance, between employees and the business processes in the applications they use or better connecting a company via its software with its external community of customers, partners and suppliers.

One way of making it easier for staff to use the Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications is to improve the user interface. Microsoft will be showing off its RoleTailored user interface, which brings the look and feel of its Windows Vista operating system and its Office 2007 desktop suite to Dynamics.

The intention is that RoleTailored will become the common user interface across all four of Microsoft's Dynamics families--NAV, AX, GP, and SL. Some of the work that went into RoleTailored was previously known by the Fenway code name.

The new UI will first appear in Dynamics NAV 5.0 due out later this month, then in Dynamics GP 10.0 and Dynamics SL 7, which are both on track to ship in June. Microsoft began shipping Dynamics AX 4.0 in June 2006 and expects to release Dynamics AX 5.0 in the first half of 2008.

Standard Platform
Microsoft is adopting "a fairly conservative approach" to bringing its Dynamics offerings together by taking incremental steps to share code across the application families, Utzschneider said.

"What you're seeing Microsoft doing is starting to form a single platform in order to serve business applications' needs," said Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. The platform will consist of Dynamics NAV at the low end serving the needs of a maximum of 50 users and Dynamics AX at the high end, she added. Microsoft will continue to come out with new versions of Dynamics GP and SL, but those largely U.S.-focused products won't make major contributions to the future Dynamics platform.

Microsoft mostly acquired its business software through the purchase of Great Plains Software in April 2001 and Navision, in July 2002. Genovese believes that Microsoft didn't appreciate the complexity of the business applications market at the time of the acquisitions and it's been a hard transition for the company. "They're just now growing up," she said. "They're in their late teenage years as a business applications company" versus older, more established players like SAP and Oracle.

Genovese views the midmarket for business applications largely as a vendor invention. What she's hearing from customers of all sizes, including those with annual revenue in excess of $2 billion, is that they're looking for business applications that don't require them to invest in their own IT development and that offer a broad range of functionality and have a predictable cost structure. "Microsoft is a prime candidate to be a leader in that market," she said, provided the company can execute on its strategy.

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Microsoft to Offer 'MySpace' for Business Apps Users

SAN DIEGO -- Microsoft today introduced the first in a planned series of online communities for users of its Dynamics applications to provide forums where peers can exchange best practices. Centered around specific industries or job titles, the first community is aimed at finance professionals such as corporate controllers, finance managers and accountants.

The software vendor made the announcement at its Convergence 2007 conference here this week as a way to help its Dynamics customers better connect with their external communities of customers, suppliers and partners.

v"You can think of it as the MySpace for financial professionals," said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Business Solutions group. "It's how you can have a Convergence [show] 365 days a year."

In talking to customers, one of their main reasons for attending the Convergence show is to engage with their peers, said James Utzschneider, general manager of Dynamics marketing at Microsoft. The vendor has been spending a lot of time recently looking at the Web 2.0 world to discover how the social network technology mostly aimed at teenagers could be applied to a business setting, he added.

Background
Microsoft demonstrated the online community concept at last year's Convergence conference and plans to bring more communities online later this year.

The online finance community can be accessed on Microsoft's Dynamics Web site. It features forums, blogs, articles, columns and tagging. While Microsoft has created the fabric of the site, the vendor intends it to be run by the community, according to Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft's Dynamics community marketing. That's why the site is as yet unnamed, with Microsoft encouraging the community to vote on what to call itself. Users also have the option to rate content within the community. So, far the name "Net Knowledge" is proving the most popular, trailed by "Finance Forum" and "Capital Chat."

In about a month, Microsoft will go live with further networking capability on the site so that users can create working groups within the community, which are either open to everyone or private where participants receive invitations to join, Dewar said.

He sees the upcoming functionality as a good opportunity for user groups to establish themselves in the online community.

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Verizon Rolls Out Nationwide WAN Service

Verizon Business on Monday rolled out a nationwide WAN service, allowing large organizations to use Ethernet to connect offices spread across the U.S.

Verizon's Virtual Private LAN Service, or E-VPLS, is the first such service from large telecom carriers, the company said. The service, delivered over Verizon Business' existing converged packet network, allows customers the flexibility to adjust their networks' bandwidth from 1M bps (bits per second) to 1G bps, Verizon said.

The new service is aimed at companies that want the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of Ethernet service paired with a nationwide WAN, Verizon said.

"We have extreme coverage," said Michael Volgende, Verizon Business' director of Ethernet services. "We're not starting from scratch in terms of network deployment."

In addition, the new service, available throughout most of the U.S. Monday, comes with service-level agreements that guarantee on-network Ethernet access 100 percent of the time, and 99.99 percent for off-network Ethernet access. The agreements include a mean time to repair of two hours for on-net Ethernet access.

By using Verizon Business' current packet network, Verizon can offer a "very strong" service-level agreement, Volgende said. "It kind of demonstrates the confidence we have in the service offering," he added.

E-VPLS allows customers to maintain control of their routing, instead of sharing it with Verizon, said Verizon Business, part of Verizon Communications Inc.

E-VPLS will allow customers to set priorities for applications through four classes of service: real time, priority, business and basic data. Real-time service is aimed at VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and digital video applications, while applications like e-mail can get a lower priority.

In addition to commercial applications, the U.S. General Services Administration requested the service as part of its Networx program, designed to help federal agencies make the transition to next-generation networking services, Verizon said.

The service will cost about US$48,000 a month for a typical Fortune 100 customer using E-VPLS to connect six sites spread across the U.S., Verizon said. That price includes bandwidth ranging from 10M bps to 100M bps. The same network would cost more than 25 percent more using traditional leased lines in a hub-and-spoke network, Verizon said.

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SEC Charges Ex-Nortel Executives

.S. and Canadian stock regulators filed fraud charges on Monday against several former executives of Nortel Networks Corp., accusing them of twisting accounting practices to make it seem that the company was meeting Wall Street expectations.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Frank Dunn, Nortel's former CEO and CFO, Douglas Beatty, the former CFO and controller, Michael Gollogly, the former controller and MaryAnne Pahapill, the former assistant controller.

Meanwhile, the Ontario Securities Commission announced it would hold a hearing on May 1 to consider sanctions against Dunn, Beatty and Gollogly.

The charges come as Nortel struggles to recover from the scandal. The company had fired or accepted resignations from all four managers by 2005, but is still repairing the damage to its financial records and its reputation. On March 1, Nortel said it would post yet another round of financial restatements and delay the filing of its 2006 annual report.

Nortel had no reaction to the new charges. "We have no comment on any proceedings against former officers or employees of the company. The company continues to cooperate fully with the regulatory authorities," Spokeswoman Jamie Moody said in an email.

The Charges
The defendants all disregarded accounting practices and disclosure requirements in their effort to manipulate the books at the Canadian telecommunications equipment maker, the SEC said in charges filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

"The fraudulent conduct at issue here was egregious and long-running," said Linda Thomsen, director of the SEC's division of enforcement, in a statement. "Each of the defendants betrayed Nortel's investors and their misconduct gave rise to billions of dollars in shareholder losses."

According to the SEC, between late 2000 and January 2001, Dunn, Beatty and Pahapill changed Nortel's revenue-recognition policies so they could appear to meet financial forecasts. And from July 2002 through June 2003, Dunn, Beatty and Gollogly created an illegal pool of reserve funds they used to fabricate profits, meet earnings targets and award bonuses.

Then, in the second half of 2003, Dunn and Beatty tried to cover their tracks by explaining the company's US$948 million restatement as an accounting error caused by internal control mistakes, the SEC said. That restatement was actually caused by the secret fund.

Although he did not address the charges, one of the defendants quickly denounced the SEC for charging executives of a company outside U.S. borders.

A Canadian Matter?
"I am disappointed that, after three years, the [SEC] has brought charges on the same day in respect of the same matter as the Ontario Securities Commission," said Dunn in a statement. "I think it would have been appropriate, under the circumstances, if the authorities in the United States had deferred to the Ontario Securities Commission in what is really a Canadian matter, and had acknowledged that the Canadian authorities are fully capable of addressing these important issues."

However, the SEC insisted that it had jurisdiction since Nortel's stock trades on U.S. exchanges.

"The action we take today sends a strong message that officers of U.S.-filing foreign corporations will be held to the same standards of accountability that are required of all participants in the U.S. financial markets," Thomsen said.

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Microsoft Releases Two Vista Fixes

As promised, Microsoft Corp. did not unveil any security fixes Tuesday. But it did push out several other patches it deemed "high priority," including two for Windows Vista.

The last time Microsoft went a month without releasing security fixes was September 2005.

Among the four updates Microsoft pegged as "non-security, high-priority" today were the usual monthly revamp of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool and new signatures for the Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 antispam filters.

One Vista-specific update was also on the list, as was another that affected both XP and Vista.

The first, dubbed "March 2007 Windows Vista Application Compatibility Update," added compatibility "shims" -- code that makes an application think it's actually running on a pre-Vista PC -- for older Windows titles, including Trend Micro's Internet Security, Windows Server 2003 (SP1) Administration Tools Pack and RealNetworks' RealPlayer 6.0.12.

The second was another revision to the Windows Media Format 11 SDK (software developer's kit) code. In the associated support document, Microsoft said that the update corrected a problem that some portable music players had in synchronizing data with subscription services.

The rare no-patch Tuesday caught some security analysts and professionals trying to figure out how to spend their free time. "Relax, take a breath," suggested Minoo Hamilton, senior security researcher with patch management vendor nCircle Network Security Inc.

"The pressure's on Microsoft to put out solid patches," said Hamilton when asked why he thought Microsoft skipped March's regularly scheduled patch day.

Microsoft's official explanation was along that line. "Microsoft continues to investigate potential and existing vulnerabilities," a representative wrote in an e-mail last week when the company announced it would do without updates. "All updates need to meet testing standards in order to be released."

"This could be what they're dealing with, or the patches are just more complicated than usual," said Hamilton. The former, however, was his bet. "Obviously, they take patch quality very seriously now. Maybe they just feel that the bar is so much higher"

The updates were made available via the consumer-oriented Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, and the enterprise-oriented Software Update Services (SUS) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

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Dell Polls PC Users on Favorite Linux Varieties

Dell Polls PC Users on Favorite Linux Varieties

Dell began polling customers about their software preferences today as part of an effort by the struggling PC vendor to meet a popular request for desktops and notebooks that run on Linux instead of Windows.

Dell posted the survey on a company blog, asking PC users to choose between Linux flavors such as Fedora and Ubuntu, and to pick more general choices such as notebooks versus desktops, high-end models versus value models and telephone-based support versus community-based support.

The company plans to collect votes through March 23, then use the feedback to begin selling Linux-based consumer PCs. Dell already uses Linux in certain server models.

"Taking a few minutes to complete this survey will help us define our forthcoming Linux-based system offerings," said Dell software architect Matt Domsch in his blog posting. "We'll take some time to analyze your feedback and work to provide the platforms and options you choose."

Background
The groundswell of demand for Linux began in February, shortly after company founder Michael Dell returned as CEO. Previous chief executive Kevin Rollins resigned in January as the company began to flounder during a series of problems, from drooping earnings reports to delayed financial filings, an accounting investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and an investor lawsuit.

As part of his campaign to help the company renew its profits and regain market share from Hewlett-Packard, Michael Dell launched a company blog to collect customer feedback. Users immediately filled the blog with requests for an alternative to Microsoft's Windows Vista OS and Office suite, such as the Linux OS and OpenOffice productivity tools.

On Feb. 23, Dell announced it will work with Novell to install Linux on business PCs including OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. Dell also said it will work with other Linux providers since users requested many other versions of the OS, such as Novell/Suse Linux Desktop, Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, Fedora, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu.

Financials
Although Michael Dell's populist approach is winning some praise, the change may come too late to save company profits in the short term. On Tuesday, a prominent analyst noted that Dell has been cutting the number of notebooks it orders from manufacturers in Taiwan. While the industry as a whole is expected to rebound in March from a sales slump preceding the launch of Windows Vista, Dell will deviate from that trend and trim its order for notebook manufacturing, said Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner in the report.

Dell did not respond to a request for comment on the forecast.

Dell is struggling financially, listing revenue and earnings growth at four-year lows even as its competitors begin to trim their costs and boost profits, Gardner said. At the same time, Dell faces future challenges as it sees slowing growth in its major markets, aggressive pricing by competitors willing to sell PCs at lower operating margins and a general decline in prices as consumers find they can run more software applications on low-end PCs.

Still, Dell's PC production remains slightly above the consensus forecast, Gardner said. In fact, the report counseled investors that HP and Apple stock could rise faster than expected in the first half of 2007, and Dell will follow with strong long-term growth, beating estimates over a 12-18 month time span.

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MacBook Bursts Into Flames

A MacBook user reported Monday that his Apple laptop burst into flames, apparently because of a bad battery. He said that the laptop battery had not been on last year's recall list.

According to an account posted to the MacTalk forum by an Australian MacBook owner identified as mattyb, the laptop was charging when his housemate woke him after hearing the computer hiss and seeing smoke pour from the device.

"At first I thought that the lamp had fallen and set fire to the curtain," mattyb wrote. "As I got closer, I realized it was my [MacBook] ... burning! I picked it up and blew on it and swung it around to put the flames out. The bookshelf it was sitting on was burnt and there were a couple of magazines that were on fire too."

After putting out the fire, mattyb noted that the laptop's battery was swollen and burnt, "so it's definitely the battery that exploded and caught fire. The MacBook is melted on the bottom and severely charred."

In an update later, the laptop owner said that local Apple representatives had told him they would come to his house to collect the damaged unit, replace it and might compensate him for property damage. "Strange thing is, there was no symptoms like excessive heat or deformation of the battery or anything like that at all," mattyb said. "I also checked quite a while ago to see if my battery was one of the recall units. It was not."

Other Battery Issues
Last August, Apple recalled 1.8 million lithium-ion batteries made by Sony. Just days before that, Dell recalled 4.1 million Sony laptop batteries because of concerns they might overheat. Several other laptop makers later joined in with their own recalls.

"We were damn lucky not to have a house burnt to the ground," mattyb said. "I have been out for most of the weekend and this night was the only night I had it charging."

Apple officials did not respond to a call for comment.

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Slow Performance From Outlook 2007

Early users of Outlook 2007, the latest version of Microsoft's market-leading e-mail client, are voicing widespread complaints about the software's sluggish performance.

Symptoms being reported by users include temporary freezes when commands are executed or windows are opened, an inability of Outlook to keep up with text as it is being typed and slowness in sending and receiving e-mails.

Most of the problems don't appear to be the result of underpowered PCs or of faulty or misconfigured e-mail servers. Instead, users say, and Microsoft acknowledges, that the underlying cause is changes made under Outlook's hood to accommodate new features such as RSS feeds and indexing for faster searches.

Some bloggers working with beta versions of Outlook 2007 have been complaining for months. Even loyalists such as Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals -- the company's elite corps of unpaid technical helpers -- are grumbling.

"A lot of MVPs are complaining about Outlook's performance," said Paul Robichaux, an MVP who works as a Microsoft Exchange consultant at 3Sharp, an IT services firm in Redmond, Wash.

Personal Experiences
For Robichaux, Outlook 2007 tends to freeze when he's trying to download e-mail from his Exchange Server. It also holds outgoing e-mail indefinitely instead of sending the messages promptly, he said. Robichaux is sure that the problem isn't with Exchange because other, near-identical PCs that are running Outlook 2007 and are connected to the same e-mail server work fine. "Clearly, there are some things I don't understand," he said.

Jason Clarke, who works in the technical sales and marketing department at Wenco International Mining Systems in Richmond, British Columbia, receives about 100 e-mails on a daily basis. He said that on his PC, Outlook 2007 "hangs completely for three to seven seconds typically, and up to 20 seconds in worst cases when new mail is being downloaded."

Turning off Outlook add-ins that he has installed, such as ClearContext's e-mail management software and Caelo Software's Nelson Email Organizer, "does improve matters marginally, but not nearly as much as it should," Clarke said. "The hesitation is still very noticeable, jarring even."

The Cause?
Clarke, who oversees Wenco's e-mail system, has posted information about Outlook's slow performance on his personal blog. He blames the problems on the new e-mail indexing engine that Outlook 2007 shares with Windows Vista.

The indexing allows searches to be done almost instantly in Outlook 2007, a vast improvement over Outlook 2003. However, the process also appears to be CPU-intensive. Microsoft recommends that users put indexing on a regular schedule instead of letting it run constantly in the background.

Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah, said he thinks some of the sluggishness arises from Microsoft's decision to let users download RSS feed data into Outlook's local e-mail file in the form of either a .pst or .ost file.

Adding RSS feeds can quickly swell the in-boxes of many users to more than 2GB of data, according to O'Kelly. He said that causes Outlook 2007, especially when it's running on PCs that don't have large amounts of memory, to write to the hard drive much more often than it typically does -- resulting in performance slowdowns. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to better tune that part of the software before the next major release, O'Kelly said.

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Scientists Show Thought-Controlled Computer at Cebit

HANOVER, Germany -- Forget speech-recognition software: How about typing a letter just by thinking it?

In a quiet corner of the Cebit trade show a small Austrian company is showing a "brain-computer interface," a technology that could one day transform how we use computers, play video games and even talk to each other.

It sounds like science fiction but is a clever application of science and technology. The system does not really read thoughts; rather, it measures fluctuations in electrical voltage in the brain and translates them into commands on a computer screen.

The system consists of a cap that fits over the user's head, with a few dozen holes through which electrodes are attached so they rest on the scalp. The electrodes are connected via thin cables to a "biosignal amplifier," which transmits the signals from the brain to a computer.

Different parts of the brain are used to process different types of thoughts. Vertical and horizontal hand movements are handled in an area called the sensory motor cortex, for example, said Christoph Guger, CEO of g.tec, which built the BCI system shown here at the giant Cebit technology show.

To use a BCI to move a computer cursor, the electrodes are placed over the corresponding part of the brain, where they read tiny fluctuations in voltage and feed them into a software program that analyzes them to figure out what the person is thinking.

The software needs to be trained to read the signals, which takes several hours to do properly. The subject responds to commands on a computer screen, thinking "left" and "right" when they are instructed to do so, for example. Another test involves looking at a series of blinking letters, and thinking of a letter when it appears.

The software "learns" what the brain's voltage fluctuations look like when those directions or letters are thought of, Guger said.

Improvements Needed
The system today is also quite slow--even a trained system can "read" only 18 characters per minute, or three or four words. Still, that may be helpful for a disabled person who cannot communicate through speech or movement. About 200 disabled people worldwide are using the software at home to communicate, according to Guger, although they need professional help to set it up.

Another issue is accuracy. In a test at a conference in Austria about two years ago, 300 attendees were trained on the system for 30 minutes. After that time the system could figure out simple binary responses from most of the people 60 percent of the time--or "better than random," Guger said. For 7 percent of the people, the accuracy was more than 90 percent, he said.

The technology is advancing. Five years ago the system was too bulky to be transported easily, and now the various parts can fit in a shoebox. In 10 years it could be fast and accurate enough to commercialize in home PCs or games consoles, according to Guber.

"Ultimately you could have wireless contacts embedded in the brain, and communicate with others just by thinking," he said. "But then you really would have to worry about your wife finding out about your girlfriend."

No-Hands Pong
At Cebit, a colleague of Guber's donned the BCI system and played the game "Pong" against a reporter. It has also been used to write letters, operate artificial limbs and steer a wheelchair. "It's not safe enough for wheelchairs today though; if it reads a command wrongly you could veer off into the road," Guger said.

The study of BCI took off in the 1990s, primarily at three laboratories, in Austria, Germany and the U.S. There are now 300 laboratories working on it, Guger said. He completed his Ph.D. in BCI at the Graz University of Technology, in Austria, in 1999, he said.

He sells his BCI systems mainly to scientists for research work. They are priced from $26,000 to $132,000 depending on their sophistication. The company is showing a smaller, Pocket PC-based device at Cebit that starts at about $4,000. More information is at g.tec's Web site.

Measuring the brain's electrical activity like this is called electroencephalography, or EEG. It is noninvasive, meaning the electrodes are placed on the scalp without surgery, but it produces weaker signals and is subject to noise interference.

Invasive techniques produce better results but are tried only on patients who require brain surgery in any case, and on monkeys and other animals.

An engineer in the U.S. holds a patent on the general BCI concept, Guger said; other patents are held by universities for specific software algorithms used to decode the brain's signals.

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Microsoft Offers Incentives to Businesses to Use Live Search

In an apparent attempt to boost its disappointing Web search market share, Microsoft is giving financial incentives to large enterprise customers whose employees use Microsoft's Live Search engine.

The program is being tested with "a select number of enterprise customers based on the number of Web search queries conducted by their employees via Live Search," Microsoft said in a statement provided via e-mail through the Waggener Edstrom public relations agency Thursday evening.

In exchange for their employees' Live Search usage, Microsoft is in exchange providing "service or training credits" to these enterprise customers, the company said. The program also allows the vendor to gather feedback from these users regarding Web search use in an enterprise, Microsoft said.

When asked what type of usage commitment participating companies must make, a spokesman for Microsoft declined to provide further details about the program.

Analysis
This is a shrewd move by Microsoft to boost Live Search by tapping into its loyal and well established enterprise customers, but the strategy has its risks, said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence. Specifically, employees could resent being forced or encouraged by higher-ups to use a specific search engine, he said.

"Ultimately you have to compete at the product level. The product has to stand on its own merits. There's a fairly high risk this will not succeed at the grassroots level, because they're using a top-to-bottom approach here," Sterling said. "I'm very skeptical of the long-term prospects for success at the level of the ordinary worker."

While Live Search is a good search engine, this program hints at a mixture of anxiety and frustration on Microsoft's part, in wanting to use its wealth and muscle to improve its Web search position, Sterling said. "It's a bit of the old Microsoft behavior," he said.

News of this program comes soon after Microsoft announced another initiative to promote use of its Live family of online services, including Live Search. On Wednesday, Microsoft said computer maker Lenovo Group will pre-load Windows Live services on its ThinkPad notebooks, ThinkCentre desktops, and Lenovo-branded PCs.

Playing Catch-up
Despite heavy investments and efforts in recent years, Microsoft hasn't been able to come close to rival Google in Web search. Consequently, Microsoft hasn't capitalized as much as expected on the boom in search engine advertising, upon which Google has built its increasing revenue and profit.

In January, Google captured 47.5 percent of search engine queries in the U.S., compared with 10.6 percent for Microsoft. This week, Microsoft acknowledged that its highest-ranking search executive, Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search, is leaving the company.

Microsoft confirmed the existence of the search incentive program after details leaked out Thursday afternoon. The news was first reported by technology publisher and author John Battelle in his Searchblog Web site, where he discusses Internet search issues.

"As search evolves into more of a productivity tool, and revenue sharing becomes more commonplace across the industry, we are engaging in mutually beneficial partnerships such as this and our recently announced deal with Lenovo to more easily enable customers to choose Live Search," Microsoft's statement said.

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HP Case Wraps Up but Pretexting Problems Remains

Although the criminal case involving the pretexting scandal at Hewlett-Packard Co. is coming to a close and a new federal law makes pretexting illegal, it will likely remain a problem for phone companies and other potential victims of the practice.

"There are always people out there who are looking to get around systems," said Walt Sharp, a spokesman for AT&T Inc., whose customer phone records, along with those of other carriers, were fraudulently obtained in the HP case.

It wasn't the first time records were taken from AT&T. The operator is expecting a resolution soon to two lawsuits, not related to the HP case, that it filed last year in federal courts in San Antonio, Texas, and San Francisco, against data brokers it accuses of using pretexting to obtain AT&T customer records, Sharp said.

On Wednesday, a state judge in San Jose, California, dismissed the felony charges against ousted HP Chairperson Patricia Dunn, and also will dismiss felony charges against former HP legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker, private investigator Ronald DeLia and data broker Matthew DePante if they perform community service and pay restitution. The investigators, hired by HP to identify which directors were leaking board deliberations to reporters, were charged with fraudulently obtaining records from a public utility, identity theft and conspiracy.

The HP case is still being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, which obtained a guilty plea in January from another figure in the case, data broker Bryan Wagner, who faces sentencing June 20 in San Jose.

But pretexting was a problem before the HP case and will be after, said Sharp.

"This is a constant process of reviewing our security measures," he said. AT&T now requires that someone requesting phone records present "very precise identifying information" to prove they are the person seeking their records, he said.

The HP case also hastened passage of federal legislation that makes obtaining private records under false pretenses, or pretexting, illegal. The bill President George Bush signed in January also prohibits the selling of such illegally obtained records.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an advocacy group, says the criminal statute sends a clear message.

"It's now illegal, so any entity with a storefront that would be engaging in this now has a strong incentive not to," said Lillie Coney, associate director of EPIC.

It'd be up to the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute violations of the new law. EPIC also thinks the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission should step in to stop pretexting, Coney said.

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1-Terabyte-Drive PCs Coming from Dell

Dell is the first computer system supplier to ship 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drives targeted at users needing to store large amounts of digital media. The higher capacity is particularly needed for storing video content, such as high-definition video. This will affect consumers first but then business, particularly media-related businesses and applications. It is a reversal of normal practice where business received higher-capacity disk drives first.

Dell vice president, Neil Hand said: "This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we're now able to bring it to consumers."

The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. XPS systems will then follow suit. A check on the US Alienware site shows four 1TB drives can be shipped. The drives are not mentioned on the UK site yet.

Dell will use Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive spinning at 7,200rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time.

Dell is also launching a 'video time capsule service'; users can upload videos to (www.studiodell.com

[Rasputin]

'Murder,' She Googled

A New Jersey woman on trial for murdering her husband in April 2004 did a Google search on the phrase "How to commit murder," exactly 10 days before she allegedly shot him to death, according to a digital technology expert, who worked for the New Jersey State Police.

Melanie McGuire, 33, also did searches on Google and MSN for "undetectable poisons," "fatal digoxin levels," "instant poisons," "toxic insulin levels," "how to purchase guns illegally," how to find chloroform," "fatal insulin doses," "poisoning deaths," "where to purchase guns illegally," "gun laws in PA," "how to purchase guns in PA," and "where to purchase guns without a permit," according to Seymour's court testimony. The testimony can be viewed in this video clip from Court TV.

Jennifer Seymour, who now works for the U.S. Department of Defense, said she examined the hard drive of computers seized by police from McGuire's attorney's office, her home and the home of her parents.

McGuire, a fertility nurse, is on trial in the Superior Court of New Jersey for first degree murder for allegedly shooting her husband William McGuire, 39, with a .38 caliber gun on April 28, 2004. At the time of his death, McGuire was employed by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

According to prosecutors, in May 2004 William McGuire's severed remains were found in three suitcases off the Virginia coast. His wife faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted.

The state grand jury indictment alleges that McGuire killed her husband inside their Woodbridge, N. J., home, dismembered his body, placed the remains in black plastic trash bags inside three suitcases, and dumped the remains in the Chesapeake Bay.

The Virginia Medical Examiner determined that McGuire was shot at least twice, once in the head and once in the chest, according to the statement.

A spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general said the judge has barred the participants from commenting on the case to the news media while the trial is going on.