Microsoft didn’t release only a refreshed test build of Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 this week. It also quietly posted an updated test build of Windows Server 2008.

Testers with pre-approved access to Microsoft’s private Connect download site can grab the Windows Server 2008 November Community Technology Preview (for both X86 and X64 machines). The build number is 6001-17042-071107-1618.

No word yet from testers on what’s new in the latest Windows Server 2008 build. It’s not yet quite Release Candidate (RC) 1, but the Softies are getting closer.

Microsoft has said to expect Windows Server 2008 to be released to manufacturing in the first calendar quarter of 2008. Windows Server 2008 will ship in eight flavors, some of which will include Microsoft’s integrated Hyper-V hypervisor, and others which won’t, Microsoft announced earlier this week.

Given that the new Vista SP1 build and this server refresh came out simultaneously, I’m wondering about any new features in the SP1 build that touch Windows Server 2008. I’ve asked Microsoft for comment on what’s in the newest Windows Server 2008 CTP, but no word back yet.

Any testers out there had a chance to download and play with the new server build? What’s new in it?

There’s a new book due out next week that should be of interest to anyone who is curious about what makes bloggers and blogging tick.

It’s called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers. And I am honored to be one of those 30 folks profiled by author Michael Banks. I feel especially honored given the other interviewees he chose for the book — everyone from Wired’s Chris Anderson, to LifeHacker’s Gina Trapani, to TechDirt’s Mike Masnick.

Banks asked all of us for details on how we got into blogging, how we choose our subjects and more. He then compiled the advice into handy how-to format so that the take-aways would be useful to other bloggers in any field.

I like that Banks mixed up the kinds of folks he interviewed for the book. It’s not all bloggers who write about technology; there are also bloggers specializing in everything from auctions, to music.

Banks and his publisher John Wiley & Sons (also the publisher for my upcoming book Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era) gave the interviewees their respective chapters for posting to our sites. This is my chapter in Blogging Heroes.

On November 14, Microsoft released the 2.0 release of its Windows Live OneCare PC security/health service, as well as the 2008 version of its Office Accounting suite for small businesses.

The final version of Windows Live OneCare 2.0, a beta build of which Microsoft released to testers in July, doesn’t look a whole lot different in its final form from the test versions. The focus in the new OneCare release is on improving multiple PC coverage for users with broadband and/or wireless networking at home, said Lead Product Manager Larry Brennan.

The 2.0 build provides a single management view of covered OneCare PCs, which will allow users to monitor the safety status of all PCs in a “OneCare Circle” and to resolve problems on any of them with one click. Other features Microsoft has added since the 1.5 release include support for printer sharing; Proactive Fixes and Recommendations (which handle problems like jobs stuck in print queues); and a system Start Time Optimizer that lets users know about infrequently used software they can opt to eliminate from their startup menus.

The price for Windows Live OneCare 2.0 stays at $49.95 (for up to three PCs) for a year. The product is available for download via the Web, as well as from online and brick-and-mortar retailers. Existing OneCare customers automatically will be upgraded for free to the 2.0 release, Microsoft said.

Office Accounting 2008 is an enhanced version of Office Accounting 2007. The 2008 edition adds a bilingual Spanish-English version for the U.S.-based Hispanic market and a customized version for the U.K. New features include simplified company set-up; bugeting functionality; universal transaction import; additional bulk e-mail invoicing; and easier conversion from sales orders to purchase orders.

Microsoft’s new small-business accounting product continues to come in two flavors: Profesional ($199.95 U.S.); and Express (free), aimed at startups and home-based businesses. Both editions may be downloaded from the Microsoft Ideawins site.

Microsoft has delivered yet another test build of Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 to testers.

On November 14, the new build — designated the SP1 Release Candiate (RC) Preview — went to a slightly expanded group of 15,000 pre-selected testers. Microsoft made a first public beta of Vista SP1 available to 12,000 testers in September. The new build, No. 6001.17042,  can be downloaded by invited testers from Microsoft’s private Connect test site.

Microsoft has been making builds of Vista SP1 available to progressively larger groups of testers since earlier this spring. The company has been dangling the promise of making a test build Vista SP1 available more broadly, first as a semi-public build downloadable by Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) members, and ultimately, by any interested parties. Microsoft posted a note to MSDN two weeks ago announcing avaiablility of a Vista SP1 beta, but later pulled the note and apologized for the false alarm.

As of November 14, Microsoft officials declined to say when broader, more public SP1 builds would hit.

Microsoft is continuing to promise delivery of Vista SP1 for the first calendar quarter of 2008. SP1 will be a rollup of fixes and updates that the company has pushed out via Windows Update since releasing Vista to manufacturing last fall. SP1 also will include support for new standards and a couple of other minor new “features.”

As one Softie recently said: “Freaking release SP1 already.”

Microsoft is extending its Office “rental” program to five more markets before the end of 2007.

Microsoft will begin offering the 2007 Microsoft Office Prepaid Edition in India, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Egypt before the end of calendar 2007, company officials said on November 14. Microsoft already offers Office 2007 on a “pay-as-you-go” basis in South Africa and Romania.

Via the pay-as-you-go program, users can choose three- or six-month subscriptions to Office Professional 2007 and pay a monthly fee to use the product. Users may renew the subscriptions at any time. If they don’t renew, Office goes into reduced functionality mode, which allows users to continue to view and print files. Users cannot create or save new files or modify existing ones in this mode.

Microsoft began testing Office under pay-as-you-go scheme in late 2006, starting with Office 2003, in South Africa, Mexico and Romania. In 2007, Microsoft cut Mexico from the list of participating countries and began offering Office 2007, rather than the older Office 2003, product via the Prepaid Edition  subscription program.

Microsoft learned some hard lessons with Windows Vista that it already is applying to Windows 7.

First and foremost: Keep Windows architectural changes to a minimum. And secondly, be more predictable (and believable) when it comes to delivery targets.

That’s according to Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management, who is chatting this week with press and bloggers about the state of Vista, just about a year after the company released the product to manufacturing.

Nash isn’t apologizing for Microsoft’s decision to introduce User Account Control prompts, default to standard-user mode (instead of administrator) or move the graphics subsystem out of the kernel space — all choices the company made in developing Vista. Nor does he think it was a mistake for Microsoft to delay the final RTM of Vista, resulting in the company missing last year’s lucrative holiday retail season.

Nash said Microsoft had to make the under-the-cover changes it did, for security and performance reasons, to Windows Vista.

“I don’t regret that we made a lot of changes to Vista,” Nash said in an interview on November 14. “But I don’t anticipate that level of architectural change in Windows 7.”

Microsoft hasn’t said explicitly what it plans to do to minimize disruptions from any internal changes it does make with Windows 7. But it has dropped some hints.

If the company does build Windows 7 on top of MinWin — the stripped-down Windows core — as it sounds as if it is planning to do, that will help reduce some problems Microsoft and its partners have encountered, in terms of Windows dependencies. There’s been talk Microsoft plans to include a hypervisor as part of Windows 7, enabling users to run applications virtually to prevent incompatibilities. And there’s always the mysterious “StrongBox” feature that allegedly is part of Windows 7. Perhaps StrongBox provides some kind of isolation from lower-level Windows changes?

In terms of delivery schedules, Microsoft has made a conscious move from being transparent to “translucent” with its future Windows release plans — including its plans for service packs. It also has appointed as head of Windows engineering a guy who knows how to make the trains run on time.

Microsoft’s main message in its communications with press and bloggers this week is that they should take another look at Vista. The Softies acknowledge now that the product got off to a rough start, in terms of missing drivers, application compatibility and overall performance and reliability. But as a result of numerous Vista updates pushed out over Windows Update, as well as changes that ISVs and hardware makers have made to their products, Vista is now running a lot more smoothly and reliably than it did a year ago, Nash said.

“A lot of the first imressions that enterprise users were having with Vista were at home,” Nash said. Initially, those experiences may not have been as solid as Microsoft and its users were hoping. “But now that experience is changing,” Nash said.

Vista is past the initial pain-point phase and deserves a reevaluation — even before Microsoft ships Service Pack 1 in the first quarter of 2008, Nash said.

Any Vista naysayers taken a recent look at the product? If Microsoft had released Vista as it runs today a year ago, would your opinion of the operating system be different?

 (7. Image by Claudecf. CC 2.0)

The OpenDocument Foundation — a group whose name and charter would lead one to believe that it was backing the OpenDocument Format (ODF), but which ended up backing a different document format instead — has closed its doors.

Sam Hiser, a systems consultant who was Vice President & Director Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, confirmed that ODF is closing its doors in a blog post on November 13. Hiser and a number of the other OpenDocument Foundation backers earlier this year decided to throw their weight behind a Worldwide Web Consortium document standard, the Compound DOcument Format (CDF), and back away from ODF.

The OpenDocument Foundation, at one point, was one of the major critics of Microsoft’s attempt to get its ODF alternative, Office Open XML (OOXML), branded as an open standard. Microsoft lost its attempt earlier this year to get OOXML fast-tracked as an ISO standard. An ISO ballot-resolution meeting on OOXML is slated for February 2008.

IBM, Sun Microsystems, Google and other ODF backers are continuing in their campaign to fight OOXML. Microsoft is pushing for standards recognition for OOXML, in large part, so that Office 2007, which uses OOXML as its default file format, will qualify for lucrative government and commercial IT contracts that call for “open,” “standards-based” products. The pro-ODF camp is trying to thwart OOXML in the hopes of gaining more market share for StarOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other products that compete with Microsoft Office. Office still has more than 90 percent of the Windows desktop-productivity-suite market.

There are some who think the OpenDocument Foundation’s passing won’t matter. But I maintain the public splintering of the ODF community is definitely creating confusion from which OOXML is likely to benefit.

What do you think: Will the OpenDocument Foundation’s death have any impact on OOXML’s future, one way or the other?

(We are closed for business forever. Image by PetroleumJelliffe . CC 2.0)

Forrester Research has issued a new study in which it predicts that at least one-third of enterprises will begin to deploy Windows Vista enterprise-wide by mid-2008.

Driving Vista adoption will be an increase in applications certified as Vista-compatible and new PC form factors which are “ready to run Vista smoothly” and at “price points will make compatible machines more affordable than they are today,” the Forrester researchers said in their “How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System” report, released on November 12.

Forrester acknowledged that a number of businesses are waiting for Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 before starting their Vista deployment rollouts. But according to current schedule, Vista SP1 is set to roll out in the first calendar quarter of next year.

“The era of Windows Vista within enterprises has officially started, with a whimper,” the Forrester researchers said. “But think of it as the snowflakes before the storm. Adoption of the newest Windows OS has been cautious at best in the first six to eight months since its initial release, hovering at just 2%, but dipping as low as 0% to 3% across different regions and company sizes.”

Forrester’s latest research — based on a survey of 1,001 “hardware decision makers at North American and European enterprises — concluded that by mid-2008, Windows Vista will be deployed across at least one-quarter of PCs. (Forrester’s survey base consisted of 43% of respondents from large enterprises; 35% from “very large” enterprises an 22 percent from Global 2000 enterprises.)

Meanwhile, Microsoft is doing what it can to spur further business deployment of Vista.

When Microsoft rolled out Windows Vista a year ago, company officials were optimistic (but not overly so) about businesses’ plans for deploying Vista. One of the main reasons the Redmondians were upbeat about Vista deployment in the enterprise was because of the number of deployment tools it had waiting in the wings.

This week, Microsoft began rolling out final and/or refreshed versions of a number of these corporate Vista deployment tools. Among them:

• Microsoft Deployment. Microsoft Deployment replaces the company’s set of Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) tools. Unlike BDD, the Deployment tool supports Windows Server deployments, not just client ones. Microsoft Consulting Services blogger Richard Smith says the current Microsoft Deployment release is just the first of three planned Microsoft Deployment rollouts between now and summer 2008. This release integrates with deployment features in Configuration Manager 2007. The next releases will add more support for WIndows Server 2008, Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 and System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 deployments.
• Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0. In its final version, out now, ACT 5.0 adds support for .Net Framework 2.0 and helps users test and fix their line-of-business applications for Vista-compatibility. Microsoft rolled out a release-candidate test version of ACT 5.0 earlier this year.
• Windows Vista Harware Assessment tool (Known both as WVHA and HAT) 2.1: A “Solution Accelerator” that allows customers and partners to decide which PCs they should upgrade to Vista and Office 2007. Beta registratino is open for the next release of this tool, which will be rnamed the “Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator,” or MAP. The new releae will including “assessment and planning scenarios for server migration, server consolidation and virtualization with Windows Server 2008,” the Softies say.
• Microsoft User State Migration Tools 3.0: A remote migration tool that preserves one or multiple users’ files and settings.

Each of these deployment tools has been downloaded about 300,000 times since they became available to customers in early 2007, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft also launched this week a new Springboard Series Web site with accompanying documentation and forums for businesses planning and migrating to Vista, with lots of how-to videos and FAQs.

What do you think of Forrester’s prediction that one-third of businesses will begin deploying Vista by mid-2008? Too ambitious? Too conservative? On the money?

A Tablet stylus and/or a user’s finger aren’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to future data-input methods in which Microsoft is investing.

There’s a new Microsoft “On 10″ video that highlights three other Microsoft Research projects focused on alternate means of data input. (Thanks to the “Microsoft At Home and At Work” team for the video link.) The three research projects — which might find their way into current or future Microsoft products at some point down the line — are:

InkSeine: An inking application that allows users to search — on their hard drives, as well as across the Web — directly from ink, without transcribing queries to a search box somewhere else. There are more than 500 Microsoft employees experimenting internally with InkSeine, according to researcher Ken Hinckley. Hinckley suggested if InkSeine ever were to be productized, it might work well as a feature in Microsoft Journal or the Microsoft InfoPath online-forms application.

LucidTouch: A multitouch prototype with a twist. Instead of using one’s finger on top of a touch screen to interact with a mobile device, what would happen if a light source behind a screen provided a “shadow” of one’s fingers, which could be used to “point” and touch type? Accuracy rates would vastly improve, especially for applications like texting on a multi-touch flat screen, the Softies say. There’s no Microsoft Research page I could find for LucidTouch, but perhaps it is a derivative of Play Anywhere.

Soap: An optical mouse integrated with a mousepad. A user can push and pull on the soap-sized squish-ball to manipulate a cursor. And the device, when sewed up into a pretty package, would be less obtrusive in a living room or a mobile setting, Microsoft is betting.

Any of these sound like something you’d like to try? So far none of them seems to be available to the public, but perhaps that will change soon….

It’s never a good thing when Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) enterprise-patch mechanism malfunctions. It’s even worse when WSUS breaks down right before the company plans to start pushing out its regularly scheduled Patch Tuesday fixes.

That’s what has happened this week. In a November 13 post to the WSUS Team blog, Microsoft officials acknowledged:

“We have been hearing reports from some customers who use WSUS that they have been having trouble accessing their administration consoles. We have confirmed the cause of this issue and fixed it on our servers, which will automatically fix the issue for most customers on their next synchronization cycle.”

Senior Program Manager for WSUS Bobbie Harder, in that same post provides “steps customers can take to get WSUS working again even sooner.”

As WindowsConnected.com notes, users were complaining about the latest WSUS problem, via newsgroups, over the weekend.

Fortunately for Microsoft and its customers, November 13 is slated to be a relatively light Patch Tuesday, with two new bulletins slated for release, Microsoft also is pushing out three new Windows Vista updates via Windows Update this week, as well.

WSUS has had a less-than-stellar track record over the past couple of months. In late October, WSUS erroneously pushed to users a Windows Desktop Search update as the result of a rules change Microsoft made in the WSUS back-end.