Archive 23

     Visio Viewer 2003 (Jan 26)

It got another update

The Visio Viewer 2003 allows anyone to view Visio drawings and diagrams (created with Visio 5, 2000, 2002, or 2003) inside their Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or later Web browser.

Visio users can freely distribute Visio drawings and diagrams to team members, partners, customers, or others, even if the recipients do not have Visio installed on their computers. Internet Explorer also allows for printing, although this is limited to the portion of the drawing currently displayed.

The Visio Viewer 2003 enables users to discover the advantages of using Visio drawings, charts, and illustrations in a Web-based environment. It is particularly useful for teams that need to collaborate from different locations.

Download: Visio Viewer 2003 (English)
Download: Visio Viewer 2003 (different language)

     New Virus: W32.Dumaru.Y@mm (Jan 25)

W32.Dumaru.Y@mm is a multi-threaded, mass-mailing worm that opens a backdoor, runs a keylogger, and attempts to steal personal information. It is very similar to W32.Dumaru.M@mm.

It uses its own SMTP engine to spread to email addresses that it finds in files on the infected system.

View: more details on Symantec

     Queen to give knighthood to Bill Gates (Jan 25)

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and the world’s wealthiest man, is to receive an honorary knighthood for “services to global enterprise”.

The recommendation that he receive the honour was made by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Buckingham Palace is expected to announce it tomorrow, when Mr Gates will speak at a conference on “Advancing Enterprise” organised by Mr Brown.

The controversial software company creator – whose commercial success has led to hatred of him among his competitors – is worth an estimated $40 billion (£22 billion). Microsoft is described as the “Evil Empire” by those who resent its grip on the computer industry.

Other Americans to have received the KBE include George Bush, the former president, Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, Steven Spielberg, the film director, and Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank.

Mr Greenspan is another speaker at tomorrow’s conference. The event has prompted resentment in the Prime Minister’s close circle, who knew nothing about it until a fortnight ago.

They are annoyed that the conference – which gathers together luminaries from the business and political worlds including Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, and Lord Browne, chief executive of BP – is taking place in Tony Blair’s most difficult week since he became Prime Minister in 1997.

“On the eve of Hutton and the university fees vote, this is Brown saying, ‘Look at all my powerful friends’,” said a Downing Street adviser.

Mr Gates has been a notable donor to charities and good causes. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was created in 2000 to improve “equity in global health and learning”. He has donated nearly $26 billion to the foundation.

The foundation set up a £139 million scholarship scheme three years ago to attract the brightest students to Cambridge University. It has also invested millions of dollars in research for an Aids vaccine.

View: Queen to give knighthood to Bill Gates

     Exchange Server 2003 Glossary (Jan 23)

This glossary comprises important terms and definitions for the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 product. In addition, the following terminology is in the glossary:
• Definitions of key components and processes within Exchange overall.
• Definitions of other processes and components from products that Exchange works with, such as Microsoft Active Directory directory service.

Generally, industry terms or definitions that would be in standard computer dictionaries, or in other Microsoft product glossaries have not been included.

Download: Exchange Server 2003 Glossary

     UNDP and Microsoft Announce Technology Partnership To Combat Poverty in Developing Nations  (Jan 23)

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Microsoft Corp. today announced a technology partnership to create and implement information and communications technology projects that will help developing countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Under the agreement, announced at the Annual Meeting 2004 of the World Economic Forum in Davos by UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown and Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, Microsoft and the UNDP will work together to build capacity in developing countries around the world, by providing technology-enabled training for youth and adults in community education centers. By providing skills training, content, curricula and other new resources, this partnership will help expand UNDP’s ongoing development efforts and will encourage the exploration of creative, technology-based solutions to the world’s most pressing development challenges. The alliance will draw on the resources of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential program, the company’s global initiative to deliver computer literacy and job skills training to underserved communities.

In addition, Microsoft and UNDP have agreed to work together in support of UNDP’s Southern Africa Capacity Initiative (SACI). In this sphere, Microsoft and UNDP will explore innovative opportunities to use technology to build capacity, facilitate e-government initiatives,and improve the delivery of basic services in countries most adversely affected by the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

“Technology is a powerful tool that can help transform lives, economies and societies,” Gates said. “We’re committed to working closely with the UNDP to develop solutions that enable people to achieve their goals and strengthen their communities.”

View full Press Release: UNDP and Microsoft Announce Technology Partnership To Combat Poverty in Developing Nations

     Microsoft sets date for Office revamp (Jan 23)

Microsoft announced on Friday that it expects to release the first major update for Office 2003 in late June.

Office 2003, the latest version of the company’s market-leading productivity package, was launched in late October amid considerable fanfare about its new capabilities, which allow the software to serve as a broad tool for consuming and manipulating corporate data.

Microsoft typically waits about six months after a major product release to put out the first service pack (SP1), a collection of previously released bug fixes and updates. The late June target for releasing SP1 for Office 2003 would put it slightly behind that pattern, but the new Office has been subject to relatively few bugs in its first three months.

The introduction of the first service pack is a milestone for major business customers, who often prefer to wait for the first roundup of patches before considering a new product stable enough to install.

Analysts have said the release of SP1 is likely to be less significant for Office 2003, however, as big businesses will still be testing the product’s extensive and complicated connections to back-end computing systems at that point. “The first service pack is kind of a bogus landmark” for Office 2003, Gartner analyst Michael Silver said. “Most businesses aren’t going to be anywhere near ready by the time that comes out.”

View full article: Microsoft sets date for Office revamp

     Added FAQ article: Cannot Delete Message (Jan 23)

There are three easy steps you can take to solve this for most situations. Please click here if you message is stuck in the Outbox.

View: FAQ article: Cannot Delete Message

     EU anti-spam laws are OK (Jan 23)

It’s just over a month since new anti-spam legislation was introduced into the UK with almost universal condemnation that the new laws would have a limited effect in the fight against junk email.

The £5,000 fine for offenders has been branded by some experts as an “inadequate deterrent”. And even those who’ve welcomed the new legislation – which is part of an EU-wide directive – doubt it will have any real impact on combating spam.

For although there is one EU anti-spam law, how it is interpreted and implemented is up to each individual European country. Earlier this week, for example, Denmark fined a telecoms hardware company a record £37,000 for sending fax spam.

In the UK, on the other hand, spammers can expect to receive fines of up to £5,000 if the case makes it to a Magistrates’ Court. What’s more, the process of bringing legal action against spammers is so cumbersome and clunky that it could be at least a year before anyone makes it inside a courtroom.

The Information Commissioner, the body charged with administering the anti-spam law in the UK, declined to reveal how many complaints it had received in the first month, except to say that it had “received a steady stream of complaints”. In the UK at least, it comes as no surprise that some people simply don’t believe the new anti-spam laws will work.

Nevertheless, there are some who believe the new legislation is a significant step forward in the right direction.

View entire article: EU anti-spam laws are OK

     Bagle Virus: The Next Sobig.F? (Jan 23)

A potentially devastating virus emerged last week, threatening to unleash the kind of widespread disruption the PC industry experienced last year with Sobig.F. But the Bagle.a virus, alternatively called Beagle and Bagel, petered out rather quickly this week after infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, according to security experts. The virus is categorized as a mass-mailing virus, which means that it replicates by spreading through email attachments.

But Bagle.a might be just the first in a series of related electronic attacks, and experts from Network Associates and Symantec are warning their customers to be on the lookout for permutations of the virus, which might be more virulent. The original versions of Sobig, for example, caused few problems, but Sobig.F was the fastest-spreading computer virus of all time, affecting millions of systems in September 2003. Bagle.a expires next week, leading some experts to believe that newer strains will materialize in a short period of time.
Bagle.a appears in email messages as an attachment and does nothing to hide the fact that it’s up to no good. The body of the email looks like this:

Test =)
(random characters)
—
Test, yep.

The attachment is always 15,872 bytes and can be renamed to virtually any name.

View: Bagle Virus: The Next Sobig.F?
View more info about Bagle on Symantec
View more info about Bagle on McAfee

     Microsoft to fund Welsh versions of XP, Office (Jan 23)

The Welch Language board said that Microsoft will pay to make Welsh versions of Windows XP and MS Office 2003.
But a group of open source volunteers thinks that the Vole’s hand has been forced by a large chunk of free software available in the language.

Those include Mozilla, openoffice.org, Scribus, Gnome, KDE and Linux.

The volunteers said that over 90,000 phrases have been translated by unpaid volunteers, making a Welsh desktop running Welsh applications possible.

The Welsh Language Act gives the language parity with English. It’s been in force for 10 years.

The volunteers point out that Microsoft still hasn’t a version of Windows or Office for Scots Gaidhlig (Gaelic), which has 60,000 speakers. Nevertheless, there’s a move to give Scots Gaelic parity.

View: Microsoft to fund Welsh versions of XP, Office

     Microsoft To Bridge Office, Back Office Apps Jan 23)

Microsoft continues to build bridges between Office desktop apps and reservoirs of back-office data. The “Information Worker Bridge” project now under way seeks to make it easier for integrators or in-house developers to make Excel or Word de-facto front ends for back-end accounting, ERP or other applications, sources said.

In theory, this would take back-office integration beyond ODBC drivers and InfoPath, the Office application that lets people build dynamic forms on their desktops that tap into back-office XML data. “What they’ve done is figured out what the ‘connector ware,’ workflow sequencing control, and sync layer will look like, and built a series of APIs accessible from Visual Studio,” said one partner close to the project. Those APIs, which will enable developers to build links to backend sources, will “figure out format conversion, transcoding and routing, so what you ask for is appropriately responded to via Excel or whatever,” said the partner, who noted that this work, plus BizTalk Server 2004 acting as a broker, will facilitate integration.

View full article: Microsoft To Bridge Office, Back Office Apps

     Customizing Microsoft Outlook Web Access (Jan 22)

This Exchange Online Book provides an overview of Exchange 2000, the Outlook Web Access architecture, and the individual components that make up Outlook Web Access. It also provides developers with the processes to customize and extend Outlook Web Access for their own solutions.

View: Customizing Microsoft Outlook Web Access

     Access 2003 Sample: Animating Microsoft Office Access 2003 (Jan 22)

Learn different methods of animating Microsoft Office Access 2003. These include using the Animation ActiveX control, the Timer control, and animating the Office assistant.

This sample accompanies the article “Animating Microsoft Office Access 2003” available from MSDN. This download includes sample files for use with the tasks presented in the article mentioned previously.

Download: Access 2003 Sample: Animating Microsoft Office Access 2003
View: Animating Microsoft Office Access 2003

     Danish spammer fined £37k (Jan 22)

A Danish company flogging telecoms kit has been fined a record £37,000 for sending spam. A Danish court handed down the Danish Krone 400,000 fine today after the company – Aircom Erhverv ApS – was found guilty of sending 15,000 unsolicited commercial emails.

Denmark, like the UK, is one of six European countries so far to have introduced new anti-spam laws based on an EU directive. In the UK, spammers can expect to receive fines of up to £5,000 if the case makes it to a Magistrates’ Court. Should they opt to have their case heard by a Crown Court then spammers face an unlimited fine. Of course, that legislation has only just been introduced in the UK and it could be at least a year before the first cases of spamming come before a court.

In the meantime, there’s always the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) to give offenders a ticking off. Like the one today, where a London-based spammer was told off for sending “several e-mails” for a prank telephone call service and for a CDROM.

View: Danish spammer fined £37k

     Bagle Virus Spread Starts To Cool Off (Jan 21)

Bagle.a, the first major mass-mailing computer virus this year, is starting to slow down after infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, security experts said on Tuesday.

The worm is programmed to stop contaminating computers on Jan. 28, but seems destined to drop off the security industry’s radar before that date. The program spreads through e-mail and infects the PCs of people who open the attachment.

The number of customers reporting a Bagle infection has declined since Monday, according to Weafer. Network Associates, a rival antivirus company, said it had an almost 40 percent fall in the number of reports received from its customers.

View full article: Bagle virus spread starts to cool off
View more info about Bagle on Symantec