HowTo-Outlook

Archive 14

Windows Clustering is a Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server feature that administrators can use to achieve continuous availability of server resources. Read this Exchange Online Book to help you understand how Exchange 2000 uses Windows Clustering and how to:

Plan for and create Exchange 2000 clusters
Monitor the performance of Exchange 2000 clusters
Maintain the availability of Exchange 2000 clusters

Download: Deploying Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Clusters

The Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Management Pack module monitors events placed in the Application event log. This Management Pack module highlights events that may indicate possible service outages or configuration problems, so you can quickly take corrective or preventative actions. For example, this Management Pack module alerts you of the following critical conditions:

Data backup or restore fails
Core services such as search, alert notifications and administration are not running
Content source crawl fails
Search propagation of one or more content indexes fails
Audience compilation or profile import fails

This Management Pack module quickly brings any failures or configuration problems to your attention, increasing the availability and performance of SharePoint Portal Server. This Management Pack module provides the knowledge and expertise you need to leverage Operations Manager for immediate return on your investment.

Download: Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) Management Pack for Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Recorded in Orlando, Florida on October 21, 2003, see Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer’s keynote presentation for the Microsoft Office System launch.

Download: Steve Ballmer Microsoft Office System Launch Video: Productivity in the Digital Decade

This document describes the monitoring scenarios that are supported by the Microsoft® Windows SharePoint Services Management Pack and includes detailed instructions for deploying, configuring, and tuning the Management Pack. This guide also includes operational guidance and reference information that lists the contents of the Management Pack.

Download: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Management Pack Guide

Anger mounts over junk mails from businesses, but EU laws look set to make the problem worse.

Over half of all opt-in marketing emails are irrelevant, inappropriate and little better than spam, according to a recent poll of internet users. One in six of all spam messages received by UK internet users is junk sent by businesses to consumers who have signed up to receive news and special offers. But the survey, conducted by customer-profiling software firm NCorp, found that seven out of 10 of the 500 consumers questioned would have “little hesitation” in transferring their business to another company if they were consistently sent ‘second degree spam’ after signing up to an electronic mailing list.

Two out of five respondents said they found marketing as annoying as double-glazing salespeople. Only one in five marketing emails contains content tailored to a recipient’s preferences and interests. And an overwhelming majority – 96.5 per cent – of the survey’s respondents said companies should have a duty of care to only send out marketing information and offers by email that they know will be relevant and of interest to the recipient.

“Sending spam is completely socially unacceptable, whatever form it takes,” said Martin Blackburn, managing director of NCorp. Consumers feel extremely let down when they are consistently sent irrelevant and inappropriate content after giving a company their permission to be emailed, he added. But he warned that the problem of second degree spam was set to worsen as new UK and EU legislation effectively banned unsolicited communications. “Hardcore spammers will therefore seek to cover themselves by using opt-in mailing lists. This means honest businesses will have to work even harder to win over the trust and confidence of consumers,” he said.

View: Consumers plagued by opt-in marketing spam

Stepping up the pressure on Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) in the VOIP equipment market, China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp., a move analysts say is bound to raise the hairs on Cisco’s neck.

Cisco and Huawei have been at loggerheads since the incumbent provider slapped a lawsuit on Huawei, accusing the company of violating copyright laws and stealing intellectual property to use in its products and support materials. Cisco recently halted the suit pending an independent review of Huawei products, after Huawei said it had changed its source code.

Now Huawei is back on the offensive, teaming up with Microsoft in China, where the two firms will sell an integrated package of next-generation network equipment from Huawei coupled with Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003. Dubbed U-SYS WorkSpace, the offering is aimed at carriers looking to offer IP Centrex and other hosted IP services like Microsoft Exchange.

View full story: Huawei Teams With Microsoft

Next month, Microsoft Corp. is planning to release an update to its Office Live Meeting 2003 that will integrate it with Windows Messenger so that users can initiate Web conferencing sessions right from the enterprise instant messaging client. In an interview with eWEEK.com during the Comdex trade show here, Microsoft officials said the move is one of many that the software maker is planning to more deeply integrate its various products with Live Meeting, the renamed Web conferencing service it acquired from PlaceWare Inc.

The Redmond, Wash., company plans to go as far as to introduce in 2005 a server-based version of Live Meeting, something the company hinted at when it introduced Live Meeting 2003 in September. While details are still being worked out, the server version will either be a stand-alone offering or a feature within Microsoft’s Office Live Communications Server presence and IM software introduced with Office System 2003 in October, said David Hastie, product manager in the real-time collaboration group.

Any server version also would work in conjunction with the hosted service so that enterprises could mix and mingle their approach by, for example, using the server software with internal employees while connecting attendees from outside the enterprise through the hosted service, Hastie said.

View full story: Microsoft Connecting Web Conferencing with IM

Version 1.2
Includes updated “Capacity Planning” topic.

This download contains information about managing Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, including:

Planning
Deployment Scenarios
Installation
Security
Configuration
Administration
Backup and Migration
Maintenance
Customization
Troubleshooting
Reference

Download: Windows SharePoint Services Administrator’s Guide

When you use Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 e-mail server by using a remote procedure call (RPC) over HTTP, Outlook 2003 may perform slowly or stop responding (hang).

CAUSE
This issue may occur in one or both of the following scenarios:

The Bypass proxy server for local addresses check box is selected in the Microsoft Internet Explorer options, and the HTTP connection to your Exchange Server 2003 e-mail server can be made through the HTTP proxy server on the network that you are connected to.
Outlook 2003 has issued a local RPC call that is waiting for a remote RPC call to complete. This problem is more noticeable when you are using a slow network connection.

View KB article: Outlook 2003 Performs Slowly or Stops Responding When Connected to Exchange Server 2003 Through HTTP

Adding sound to a mail message in Outlook Express is pretty straight forward; Forward-> Background-> Sound. In Microsoft Office Outlook it isn’t that straight forward at all. It is even quite hard to find. Probably because Microsoft Office Outlook is targeted to a more business public than a home user one. But if you look a bit closer you’ll find that you can do a lot more fun stuff Microsoft Office Outlook than Outlook Express. This guide not only instructs you how to add a sound to an e-mail but also leads you to options to let you add stuff like scrolling text or even a movie!

View: Adding Sound to Your E-mail

Yesterday Microsoft launched the Microsoft Anti-Spam Virtual Press Room. This site has been designed to provide you with all the latest news and information about Microsoft Corp.’s efforts to work with customers, partners, government, law enforcement and industry to help solve the spam problem for e-mail users.

View: Microsoft Anti-Spam Virtual Press Room

Administrators of e-mail systems based on Microsoft’s Exchange might have spammers using their servers to send unsolicited bulk e-mail under their noses, a consultant warned this week.

Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard University junior and president of consulting company Think Computer, published a white paper Thursday detailing the problem, discovered when a client’s server was found to be sending spam. Greenspan’s research concluded that Exchange 5.5 and 2000 can be used by spammers to send anonymous e-mail. He says even though software Microsoft provides on its site certifies that the server is secure, it’s not.

“If the guest account is enabled (on Exchange 5.5 and 2000), even if your login fails, you can send mail, because the guest account is there as a catchall,” he said. “Even if you think you’ve done everything (to secure the server), you are still open to spammers.”

Microsoft, however, said the problem is relatively minor and that the company hasn’t had many complaints. “This particular method of sending spam relies on specifically configured servers or is leveraging weaknesses in the protocol itself,” the software giant said in a statement issued in response to questions from CNET News.com. “The fact is that Microsoft has not received a lot of calls from customers that have experienced problems detailed by Think Computer.” Moreover, the company said the issue doesn’t affect the latest version of the software, Exchange Server 2003.

View full article: Mail server flaw opens Exchange to spam

Today at COMDEX Las Vegas 2003, Microsoft Corp. announced continuing industry support for its Protect Your PC campaign, demonstrated by a new anti-virus and firewall offering from Computer Associates International Inc. (CA). Starting today, CA will offer its eTrust EZ Armor consumer anti-virus and firewall desktop security suite, including free updates and signatures for a year. The special CA offer includes one year of personal firewall and antivirus protection, including daily virus signature updates. The free software will be available for download through June 30, 2004, from the CA Web site and can be accessed via a link from Microsoft Protect Your PC Web site. CA joins other leading vendors working with Microsoft to increase awareness and education about PC security among customers.

The Protect Your PC campaign is designed to help consumers understand a few simple measures they can take to decrease threats from viruses and other malicious attacks. Customers are encouraged to take three key steps to protect their PCs:

Use an Internet firewall on all PCs and laptops
Update their computer
Use up-to-date anti-virus software

View: Microsoft’s Protect Your PC Campaign Gains New Industry Partner

Two months ago I posted you a demo of the new Hotmail. Now there is a second demo available. It shows new Hotmail features like Calendar and Calendar sharing. The Contacts area has gotten a nice update as well.

View: Old demo (you must be logged on to Hotmail first)
View: New demo

Today at COMDEX Las Vegas 2003, Microsoft Corp. announced Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition 2004, the latest version of its Tablet PC operating system. The new version features deep integration of pen support in Windows XP, making it easier to create text anywhere in Windows and familiar Windows applications. In addition to recently announced tools in the Tablet PC SDK that enable them to create pen-aware Web pages, the new operating system now offers software developers a rich set of capabilities to deliver innovative software applications based on the Tablet PC platform.

Key features of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004 include the following:

Enhanced “ink to text” experience throughout Windows and in any Windows application, makes the pen a mainstream input device. Inserting text is easier with the new Tablet PC Input Panel (TIP), and word and case recognition is improved. Developers and users can even add “rules” for how handwriting should be recognized in certain text fields (e.g., e-mail messages, addresses, URLs).
Integration in Microsoft Office 2003 and Office OneNote 2003 offers enhanced productivity by allowing users to annotate anywhere in Microsoft® Office Word, Excel or PowerPoint® 2003, and send handwritten e-mail in Office Outlook® 2003. OneNote (TM) on the Tablet PC brings together ink, text and Web content in one application.
New capabilities enable developers to create powerful productivity applications. Developers can integrate pen and ink in Web-based line-of-business solutions. Companies such as FranklinCovey Co. and Corel Corp. are deeply integrating pen and ink in their applications. This support makes ink as natural to use as text or any other feature.

View full PressRelease: Microsoft Announces the Next Version of the Tablet PC Operating System
View: Q&A: Inside the Next Version of the Tablet PC Operating System

Use "4PM76A8" to get a discount when ordering!

Archive 13

Microsoft is committed to sharing its internal IT security practices in order to help its customers successfully secure their environments. This paper describes what Microsoft’s Corporate Security Group does to prevent malicious or unauthorized use of digital assets at Microsoft. This asset protection takes place through a formal risk management framework, risk management processes, and clear organizational roles and responsibilities. The basis of the approach is recognition that risk is an inherent part of any environment and that risk should be proactively managed. The principles and techniques described in this paper can be employed to manage risk at any organization.

Download: Security At Microsoft IT Showcase Technical White Paper

Microsoft on Monday said it will license the XML-based file formats used in the latest edition of its Office applications on a royalty-free basis.

The move is designed to give companies better access to documents that are created using Office 2003, the latest edition of Microsoft’s desktop application suite. Microsoft said it is taking the action in response to requests from its software partners as well as from corporate and government customers who demanded a way to better interoperate with Microsoft’s dominant suite of desktop applications.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company’s Extensible Markup Language (XML) reference schemas for Excel, and the InfoPath forms application will be available starting Dec. 5. WordprocessingML for Word, the XML schema for Word, will be available online Monday.

View complete article: Microsoft pries open Office 2003

See for the download the article below this one

This download contains the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas and related documentation. The current download includes the schemas and documentation for WordprocessingML, the XML file format for Microsoft Office Word 2003.

This download will be updated December 5th, 2003 to also contain schemas and documentation for SpreadsheetML (Microsoft Office Excel 2003) and FormTemplate XML schemas (Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003).

Download: Office 2003 XML Schemas

Innovative spam-filtering technology developed at Microsoft Research is being deployed across all Microsoft e-mail platforms as part of the company’s multi-pronged effort to chase unsolicited e-mail and practitioners of illegal spamming out of consumers’ inboxes.

In his keynote address at COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 on Sunday evening, Bill Gates unveiled SmartScreen Technology, a machine-learning-based filtering technology. SmartScreen Technology uses a probability-based algorithm to essentially “learn” what is and what isn’t spam based on characteristics of both types of mail. The source material for educating SmartScreen Technology has come from hundreds of thousands of e-mail users who contribute to Microsoft’s feedback loop program. Gates called SmartScreen Technology a major advance in the battle to help secure consumers’ inboxes and return greater productivity to people’s e-mail experience.

SmartScreen Technology has already been incorporated into the spam filters for Microsoft Outlook 2003, MSN 8 and Hotmail, and will soon be available in a new Intelligent Message Filter for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 that is planned for release to customers in the first half of 2004.

View full article: Microsoft Adds New Spam Filtering Technology Across E-Mail Platforms

Last week I added a How To on color coding your e-mail. After some good reactions on this I decided to create an advanced guide for this as well and here it is!

Directing mails to different folders to sort or distinguish them is probably one of the most used way of organizing mail. There is a different one however; color code them!

Color coding has a few advantages I think over moving them to separate folders. One of them is that you don’t get lost in all sorts of mail folders. Also sometimes a folder doesn’t make much sense as you just want to strike some messages and moving them to a different folder could cause them to strike even less!

View: Color Code Your E-mail Advanced
View: Color Code Your E-mail Basics

The goal of this course is to educate IT Professionals in the area of deploying Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2003, Standard Edition. The target audience for this course is system integrators and MCSEs who have experience in deploying Exchange or real-time environment technologies.

Download: Course 2081a Live Communication Server

A computer virus that camouflages itself as a message from PayPal has started spreading among home users, antivirus companies said on Friday.

The program is a variant of the Mimail virus, which has previously spread by appearing to be a security advisory from Microsoft. The latest version of the program is attached to an e-mail forged to look as though it came from PayPal, an online payment service bought by eBay last year. Running the program infects the victim’s computer and asks the PC user for credit card information, which the virus then sends to the attacker.

“It is a new trend among virus authors to get deeper into criminal acts and attempt to generate revenue,” said Craig Schmugar, virus research engineer for security company Network Associates.

The virus appears as an attachment–“www.paypal.com.scr”–to an e-mail that purports to be from PayPal. When a person opens the e-mail attachment, a window appears bearing the PayPal logo and asking for credit card information. The virus stores any information provided by the victim in a file called “ppinfo.sys” and the file is sent to four e-mail addresses stored in the program.

View: New virus disguised as PayPal e-mail
View: Technical info about Mimail.H on Symantec

The SDK contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, and references to guide you in developing solutions based on Windows SharePoint Services as a platform. The SDK includes information about the following technologies:

Web Part Framework — Create, package, and deploy Web Parts on SharePoint sites.
Server-side object model — Work with individual lists and sites or manage an entire Windows SharePoint Services deployment.
Web services — Use default Web services, or create custom Web services, to interact with Windows SharePoint Services from external applications.
Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) — Customize the schemas that define lists and sites, define queries for use with members of the object model or Web services, and specify parameters for use with methods in Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol.
RPC protocol and other protocols — Post requests from client applications to the server in order to access or modify data.
Client-side APIs — Use ActiveX controls to launch applications on the client or to provide other features that enhance Windows SharePoint Services.

Download: Windows SharePoint Services 2003 SDK

Use these sample files to create custom reporting forms. You can create individual and summary status reports using an InfoPath form library and a SharePoint site. These files include a custom template that provide customized views of the form library.

Download: Integrating SharePoint Products and Technologies and InfoPath 2003 Sample

This document describes the monitoring scenarios that are supported by the Microsoft® SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Management Pack and includes detailed instructions for deploying, configuring, and tuning the Management Pack. This guide also includes operational guidance and reference information that lists the contents of the Management Pack.

Download: Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Management Pack Guide

The Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Upgrade Series is specifically created to assist you in the process of planning, deploying, and operating Exchange 2000 Server. Whether you are part of a large multinational organization with branch offices all over the world or a small company based in one location, the information and best practices contained in this guide should save you considerable time and effort.

Download: Exchange 2000 Server Upgrade Series – Planning Guide

There are 28 anti-spam add-ins for Outlook in the slipstick.com software archive MAPIStore.Com — those are real add-ins by third-party developers, fully integrated with Outlook and implementing the newest spam filtering methods, including self-training ones based on various modifications of the Bayesian method. Microsoft Outlook 2003 is supplied with built-in junk mail filter based on “state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research”. This Microsoft technology is considered in our article.

Spam filtering is a very difficult task, which is evident at least from the fact that, despite numerous software solutions offered and attempts to enforce anti-spam legislation, our mailboxes are still stuffed with junk mail. And the problem is growing even more serious year after year.

Probably, that’s why we failed to learn about the new Microsoft technology from publications about Microsoft Office 2003 much more than one could read in the program help: “technology : that is used to evaluate whether an unread message should be treated as a junk e-mail message based on several factors, such as the time it was sent and the content of the message”. In our opinion, spam filtering has something in common with cryptography: the fact that the algorithm is kept in secret doesn’t make it crack-proof, nor does it guarantee effective spam filtering. And that’s why we decided to publish this article.

Our company is specializing in development of add-ins for Microsoft Outlook, therefore we thoroughly scrutinize all innovations in Microsoft Office — both as users and as software developers. As users, we were a bit surprised to find a hint at usage of some variant of the Bayesian’s method for the filtering in one of the articles about Microsoft Office 2003 — and we expected to see something trainable. However, the filter appeared to us as kind of “black box” — we could only choose between the two filter response levels — low and high. No more controls were provided. We tried to train the filter, marking messages as spam and vice versa, but all in vain.

Then we started studying it as software developers. In Microsoft Outlook, unlike Outlook Express, there are advanced and well documented facilities for creation of add-ins, using which a software developer can add almost any feature to Outlook. Alas, here disappointment was awaiting us again: neither the filter itself, nor any other anti-spam components could be detected (senders black list etc.) anywhere. Of course, they did exist and they worked, but a third-party software developer couldn’t get access to them or find out any information about them.

View full article: Microsoft Outlook 2003 Spam Filter: Under the hood

This year, use your own creativity with Windows XP to make unique gifts for your friends and family. Discover how to use digital music, home movies, and photos to create one-of-a-kind personalized presents, and a homemade holiday whose memories you will treasure forever.

Download all the goodies you need to create memorable holiday gifts, plus a few special items just for you, including screen savers, Windows Media Player skins, and more.

View: Winter Fun

Platform Computing has released a software module that enables Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software to tap into the power of a grid computing system, the company said Tuesday.

The Excel adapter is now a standard part of Platform’s Symphony Suite, software the Toronto-based company sells to join groups of computers together into a single pool of processing power. Platform is aiming the Excel adapter software at financial services companies, where analysts often must perform high-speed calculations such as calculating the risks incurred by a particular change to a stock portfolio.

The software moves a common desktop software package one step closer to the widespread but still-distant notion of computing power that will be much like today’s electrical power grid: something that’s always available for those who need a little more computing capacity. This idea is closely related to the utility computing concept that’s under development in various forms at many of the largest computing hardware and software companies.

View full article: Excel spreadsheets tap into grid power
View: Official Press Release from Platform

A funny download for everyone! It’s a bit like the Screenmates which already existed for Windows 3.x. Hmm, has Clippy become a real ghost or is he just pretending? Well something says me that we still haven’t seen the last of him…

Experience music in a whole new way with lifelike 3-D and animated dancers that groove on your desktop with dozens of entertaining and hilarious dance moves. Try the freely downloadable “LE” version of Plus! Dancer then step up to the full version and get a choice of sizes and a wide range of dancers to choose from!

System Requirements
Supported Operating Systems: Windows XP

Microsoft Windows® XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Requirement: 233 megahertz (MHz) processor, such as an Intel Pentium or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processor.
Recommendation: 500 MHz processor or faster, such as a Pentium III or equivalent processor.
Sound Card

Download: BooWho_DancerLE.exe
Download: Cobey_DancerLE.exe
Download: EandM_DancerLE.exe
Download: Jade_DancerLE.exe
Download: Kris_DancerLE.exe

View: Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition
View: Meet the dancers

Archive 12

Microsoft® Office Project Server 2003 supports use by multilingual and multinational companies with a language plug-in called the Multilanguage User Interface Pack (MUI Pack). To add language support after you have finished installing Project Server, simply install the MUI Pack for the language you want to add.

View: Microsoft Project Server 2003: Multilanguage User Interface Packs

This update resolves the “Certificate Validation Flaw Could Enable Identity Spoofing” vulnerability in Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4. Download now to help prevent an attacker from attempting identity spoofing using certificates.

Download: Security Update for Microsoft Windows 2000: KB329115 (English)
Download: Security Update for Microsoft Windows 2000: KB329115 (different language)
View: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-050

Run Windows Update

Get the latest version of MSN 6.1! The word goes that version 7.0 is already worked on.

Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 build 6.1.0202 (English)
Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 build 6.1.0202 (different language)

This developer sample includes a sample XML resume template for use in developing your own templates that takes advantage of a resume schema in XML and then allows end users (who have no knowledge of XML) use the template to create resume documents.

Included in this sample is the default resume.dot template file used with Microsoft Office Word 2003 and a companion .XSD file for use with the MSDN article “Creating and Applying an XML Resume Template in Microsoft Office Word 2003.”

Download: Word 2003: Sample XML Resume Template
View: Creating and Applying an XML Resume Template in Microsoft Office Word 2003

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-048 – Cumulative Update for Internet Explorer (824145)

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-049 – Buffer Overrun in the Workstation Service Could Allow Code Execution (828749)

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-051 – Buffer Overrun in Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions Could Allow Code Execution (813360)

View: Microsoft Windows Security Bulletin Summary for November, 2003

Run Windows Update

Now you can quickly and easily create hyperlinks that open in a new window configured exactly the way you want. Spawn makes it a breeze to create popup windows right within FrontPage in a flash!

The popup windows work great in all browsers, even Netscape 4.5. When you set the location of the popup window with Spawn, the location you specify is correctly read by Netscape and Internet Explorer both. Get better performance from Spawn.

This version supports CSS classes, a Title tag, and complete control over the placement of Spawn’s script and is now supported in shared borders and frames.

Download: Spawn Add-in for FrontPage
View: Jimco Add-ins

Organised spammers may have launched a new assault on Web users, with an anti-spam company reporting a spike in the amount of junk mail being sent.

An email security firm has warned that spammers may be increasing their assault on Web users, after detecting a rise in the amount of unsolicited junk messages sent across the Internet. FrontBridge, which provides outsourced email filtering services for companies, said this week that it detected a 15 percent increase in spam between the 14th and 18th October — which it believes is a sign that organised spammers are ratcheting up their activities.

“Users who until this point had remained spam-free are now reporting multiple messages per day,” said Craig Whitney, FrontBridge’s European director. “This latest jump in the volume of spam being generated just adds to the load that enterprises have to manage every day,” Whitney added. This mid-October surge in spam activity could mean that some of the most determined and active spammers have added many more email addresses to the lists that they use when sending their unsolicited emails. Other experts, though, believe that the anti-spam industry should be able to combat the threat.

“We often see spikes in the spam load that last a few days. This may be attributed to one such spike,” Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at Messagelabs, told ZDNet UK. “Generally these do not last, as it is very difficult to sustain these kind of attack levels without getting noticed. The general trend for spam, though, is definitely on the up, with our latest figures showing that 50.5 percent of all email is now spam.”

FrontBridge has also announced that it is targeting the European enterprise market by launching a Euro HQ in London. Through this, it hopes to persuade more companies to sign up for its managed email security services, which it claims can save a company £71 per user per year.

View: Spam surge raises fears of junk mail assault

Every month, Microsoft executives and other experts host live online chats about Windows XP, Media Center PCs, Tablet PCs, and Smart Displays. The experts from Microsoft, its partners, or the user community will answer your questions, take your suggestions, and discuss computing.

November 11th 3:00pm Pacific /6:00pm Eastern /11:00pm UK (GMT)
Inking in Office 2003 – Members of the Tablet PC team at Microsoft will host this chat about using the inking features in Microsoft Office 2003 on a Tablet.

Download: Reminder to your calendar
View: Enter Chat Room

Office 97
Excel 97 Security Patch- KB830356 Download: English
Word 97 Security Patch- KB830354 Download: English

Office 2000
Excel 2000 Security Patch- KB830349 Download: English
Word 2000 Security Patch- KB830347 Download: English

Office 2002/XP
Excel 2002 Security Patch- KB830350      Download: English
Word 2002 Security Patch- KB830346      Download: English
Office XP Web Services Security Patch- KB812708                      Download: English
FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions Security Patch- KB813380     Download: English

Run Office Update

Directing mails to different folders to sort or distinguish them is probably one of the most used way of organizing mail. There is a different one however; color code them!

Color coding has a few advantages I think over moving them to separate folders. One of them is that you don’t get lost in all sorts of mail folders. Also sometimes a folder doesn’t make much sense as you just want to strike some messages and moving them to a different folder could cause them to strike even less!

View: Color Code Your E-mail

Download the construction information update to keep the road construction projects information of your maps current in Streets and Trips. Save the file in the folder where you installed the program files for MapPoint or Streets & Trips. I.e. C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Data\.

Download: MapPoint 2001 and Streets and Trips 2001 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2002 and Streets and Trips 2002 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2003 and Streets and Trips 2003 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2004 and Streets and Trips 2004 Construction Update

This one is very handy to keep for configuring your firewall!

This spreadsheet shows what network ports are used by the system services utilized by the Microsoft Windows Server System products.

Download: Port Requirements for Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Corp. today helped companies arm their sales professionals with a new tool for winning that next bid by introducing the Microsoft® Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals. This is the latest in a series of accelerators that help companies and partners realize greater value from their investments in the Microsoft Office System by more quickly delivering new capabilities to information workers.

The Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals allows organizations to rapidly develop solutions that help sales teams create more winning proposals by substantially streamlining the proposal development process. By integrating seamlessly with Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, the accelerator allows sales professionals to work more productively with familiar software.

View full Press Release: Sales Teams Get Edge in Creating Winning Bids From New Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals
View: Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals Website
Download: Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals (Microsoft Office Word 2003 and InfoPath 2003 of the Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 required)
Download: Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals Documentation
View: Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals Demo

Britain’s bosses are getting tougher with workers who disobey Internet and email use and abuse policies. Almost half (45 per cent) of employers in a study by IRS Employment Review said they had punished workers for such reasons in the last year. Less than five per cent dealt with more than six cases, but one UK employer had punished 10 workers for Internet and email misuse.

Of the 90 per cent of respondents who answered policy questions in the survey, all cited “accessing pornography” on the Internet as forbidden, with almost all (96 per cent) also citing the sending of obscene emails as proscribed behaviour. Other forbidden activities include: emails that denigrate colleagues (63 per cent), Internet gambling (63 per cent), using Web-based email (45 per cent), Internet shopping (31 per cent) and sending non-work related emails (14 per cent).

Two thirds (66 per cent) of the organisations quizzed offer access to email facilities to all employees but wider Internet access is more tightly controlled. Just over half (57 per cent) of the organisations polled give Net access to all employees, but 24 per cent limit it to office-based employees and just under five per cent restrict Internet access to managers alone. Approximately, two-thirds of the survey’s respondents operate an intranet.

View full article: UK employers get tough on Net abuse

I’m not sure whether they are talking about the already released Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals (Nov 7) or about an updated version of it.

Well the press release is out now. I was right; it is the software download I got you the link for on November 7.

Microsoft is set to release on Monday one of the first add-on packages for the new version of its Office productivity software: a collection of software and services aimed at helping sales professionals create better proposals. The package, available as a free download for Office 2003 customers enrolled in Microsoft’s Software Assurance licensing program, is part of the Office Solution Accelerator Program that the company announced shortly before the release of the new Office System.

The new Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals includes templates and tools to help sales professionals create proposals, including guidelines for building services that cull data from corporate databases to ensure that proposals reflect the latest facts and figures.

View: Office add-on makes a sales call

Archive 11

PowerPoint tips: perfect presentations (Nov 9)

PowerPoint is the most popular tool for giving presentations. It’s ideal for everything from sales talks to academic lectures.
The program makes compiling and running a presentation easy, but there are still pitfalls that can trip up even the best presenter.

Presenting is about a lot more than displaying slides on a screen. You have a message to deliver and the presentation is a means of getting that message across.

You’ll need some presentation skills to engage your audience and persuade them to listen to what you’re saying, but the way you set up and use your PowerPoint slides can also help a lot.

View: PowerPoint tips: perfect presentations
View: PowerPoint tips: perfect presentations (mirror in my Other Programs section)

You won’t need to wait for Longhorn in late 2005 to get pop-up ad blocking in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). Microsoft will release IE 6.05 as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), which is due in the first half of 2004. Whether IE 6.05 will include some of the other new IE features, such as the new download manager, found in the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003 Longhorn build is unclear. But pop-up ad blocking is definitely among the changes we can expect, as are other new security features such as more locked-down Internet security zones.

View: IE 6.05, Pop-Up Ad Blocking to Debut in Windows XP SP2

This download contains all Exchange 2000 and 2003 technical articles and books produced by the Exchange product team through October 2003.

Download: Exchange 2000 and 2003 – All Technical Articles and Books / Updated

In Exchange 2000, as in Exchange 5.5, a public folder is a storage container for messages or information shared among all users in your organization. Public folders can still contain different types of information, and they are still part of the information store that Exchange clients and Web browsers can access. Now, Microsoft Office 2000 and custom applications can also access Exchange public folder stores. You can open and save documents directly in the public folder stores.

After upgrading to Exchange 2000, take the additional step to reconfigure public folders with the help of this article.

Download: Upgrading Public Folders from Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 to Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server

These diagrams describe the Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 Setup as a flow diagram. You can view this information in two ways:

To view the Project Server 2003 Setup Flow Diagram in your browser, open Project_Server_Setup_Flowchart.htm in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later.
To view the Project Server 2003 Setup Flow Diagram in Microsoft Office Visio 2003, open Project Server Setup Flowchart.vsd.

Download: Microsoft Office Project 2003 Setup Flow Diagram

Microsoft has at last commented on the blunder that resulted in its lapsed hotmail.co.uk domain being snapped up by a private individual.

The person – who asked not to be named – then tried to alert Microsoft to the slip and hand back the domain, much like any decent person would if they saw someone drop a handkerchief, or a wallet, in the street.

However, his attempts to return the domain were ignored. Microsoft only took notice once El Reg got involved.

Anyhow, the software giant is remaining tight-lipped about how such an oversight might have occurred.

Instead, it said in a statement: “Microsoft has resolved this issue. We have put processes in place to ensure there is no recurrence of this eventuality.”

What a relief. ®

View: Microsoft ends silence on hotmail domain SNAFU

This download is for developers who are interested in developing custom solutions that use the smart document functionality introduced in the Microsoft® Office System.

The Microsoft® Office 2003 Smart Document SDK contains documentation, tools, sample code, and XML schemas.

Download: Office 2003 Smart Document Software Development Kit (SDK)

For anyone thinking Office 2003 is just another ho-hum productivity suite upgrade, it’s time to download a trial version and start taking a long, hard look at the software’s extensibility.

As I have noted many times, Microsoft is trying to turn Office, like Windows, into a platform onto which developers and businesses build other programs or custom applications. A number of new Office features showcase this extensibility. In the recent Jupiter Research report, “Microsoft Positions Office 2003 for Enterprise Information,” I explore one new, extensible feature: The Research pane.

Research pane optionally opens down the right-hand side of any Office 2003 document. Installing the software also replaces Internet Explorer’s built-in search feature with a modified version of Research pane. Through the Office Research pane, people can do Web searches using MSN and access stock quotes, translation services and online subscription-based information databases Factiva and eLibrary. My report looks at what applications or browsers business users use to access back-end corporate and Internet-located information, what applications they would like to use to access this information and whether they use or change a browser’s default search settings, among other findings. The report also reviews the potential competitive impact of the feature and makes recommendations to Microsoft’s competitors, customers and partners.

The report hinted at, but did not delve into some of the Research pane’s e-commerce capabilities, which circles back to my original point about Office 2003 extensibility. Besides supporting Extensible Markup Language (XML), one of several standards adopted for Web services, Research pane also supports Secure Socket Layer (SSL). So, in theory, a company supporting XML Web services could conduct e-commerce sales from within the Research pane. No Web browser required. I want to repeat that: No Web browser required.

View entire article: Office 2003: No Browser Required

The Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals enables partners and organizations to rapidly create proposal development solutions to increase the win rate of sales teams.

Designed in response to feedback from customers who want to derive additional value from their Microsoft Office System investments, the Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals helps sales professionals to improve their proposal win rate by streamlining the proposal development process, facilitating the use of the latest approved product and legal information, and ensuring a systematic evaluation of bid opportunities. Using the extensive input from our customers, Microsoft designed the Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals to help sales professionals specifically by automating proposal process steps, leveraging a corporate knowledge base, establishing effective collaboration, and increasing project control. Furthermore, the Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals is fully integrated with Microsoft Office Word, so that sales professionals can quickly adopt the solution and work more productively with familiar software tools.

The Microsoft technology partners play a central role in delivering the complete, end-to-end proposal development solution to customers by integrating, configuring, customizing and consulting using the Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals.

Download: Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals
Download: Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals Documentation

With the Microsoft Office 2003 Research Service SDK, you can build information services that provide users with robust information sources and actions that make it possible for users to manage information in powerful ways—all from within their Office applications. You can also easily adapt existing information stores to provide content to Office applications, so that users can take advantage of information services when authoring documents, presentations, and so on.

Download: Office 2003 Research Service SDK

This week a question in the newsgroup was what happens to mails dragged to the Outlook Today folder? Although the solution is rather easy it can be a real pain when you don’t know where to look and you really need to access those items. So I added it to my FAQ.

View: What happens to mails dragged to the Outlook Today Folder?

Microsoft was busy covering up an almighty cock-up last night after forgetting to renew its hotmail.co.uk domain name.

Despite being warned that the domain for its popular Web mail service was up for renewal, it seems Microsoft – or whoever had the task of managing its hotmail.co.uk domain – overlooked this vital piece of administration. As a result, last month Microsoft lost its claim to the domain and it was duly returned to the open market to be picked up by whomever fancied it.

Luckily, the domain was snapped up on the same day – October 23. The new owner – a good hearted soul – then proceeded immediately to contact Microsoft, inform the giant of its slip and arrange to hand back the domain. However, Microsoft didn’t want to know. Despite phone calls and emails – and being fobbed off by Microsoft drones – our man behind this public-spirited deed was completely blanked by the software empire. Microsoft only took notice when The Register contacted the company yesterday afternoon to enquire why its hotmail.co.uk site was registered to a private individual. It was then we were told that the matter was under investigation and being “escalated”. Worryingly, no one in the UK could deal with the matter so it was up to the US to sort things out.

Of course, while Microsoft’s spinstresses tried to stall for time, the company was busy scurrying behind the scenes to sort out this embarrassing episode. It managed to contact hotmail.co.uk’s new owner, grovel at their mistake and sort out the mess. By all accounts, hotmail.co.uk will be returned in a few days.

A spokeswoman for Nominet UK – the registry for all .uk domains – confirmed that hotmail.co.uk had failed to be renewed and was placed back into pool of available domains. For Nominet’s part, she confirmed that “all the standard renewal procedures were followed regarding hotmail.co.uk”. “I would like to remind companies and their agents that it is their responsibility to renew their domains,” she said.

Despite repeated attempts to seek comment from Microsoft, the software giant has failed to cobble together any form of statement that might shed light on this situation.

In December 1999, Microsoft forgot to renew the domain name Passport.com, and so rendered its Hotmail service partially crippled. A Linux programmer, Michael Chaney, paid the $35 fee and promptly handed over ownership to Microsoft. Here is his story.

View: Microsoft forgets to renew hotmail.co.uk domain

New legal and technological tools can curb the spam epidemic.

Although tarnished by misuse, the Internet’s first popular application is beginning to get its groove back.

E-mail is what attracted millions of people to the Internet originally, but lately a flood of spam has diminished its usefulness as a tool for global communication and legitimate e-commerce.

Each day, e-mail service providers, including Microsoft’s MSN, filter out billions of spam messages before they reach subscribers’ Inboxes. Still, the volume continues to rise, and enough gets through to bedevil customers.

According to a recent national survey commissioned by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit research organization, 70 percent of e-mail users say that spam has made their online experience unpleasant or annoying. One-quarter say that spam has caused them to reduce their use of e-mail.

Yet, the tide is turning, thanks to multipronged efforts by the technology industry, other businesses and governments. Last month marked an important milestone as the United States Senate voted 97-0 to outlaw the shadiest tactics used by many spammers.

View: It’s Your Inbox

Additional resources:

Our approach to the spam problem
More information on the company’s multi-pronged strategy and links to information on blocking and filtering spam with Microsoft products.

Bill Gates: Toward a Spam-Free Future
A message to customers from Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect

The Can-Spam Act of 2003
Text of the bill approved by the United States Senate (.pdf file – 60 pages)

Pew Internet & American Life Project
A report on how spam is hurting e-mail and degrading life on the Internet

These diagrams describe the relationships between tables and fields in the Microsoft Office Project 2003 database.

Download: Microsoft Office Project 2003 Database Schema
Download: Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 Database Schema

Anyone who has lost files or work due to a computer virus or worm knows the frustration and aggravation such events cause. Multiply that by the number of people and businesses impacted by the attack, and add in the cost of replacing or rebuilding the damaged or lost files, systems and even hardware, and the magnitude of the problem becomes clear. Most notably, the MSBlast worm and Sobig viruses have caused millions in damages worldwide and inconvenienced millions of businesses and consumers across the globe.

Despite the heavy costs of such crimes, tracking and pursuing those who illegally launch destructive code can be very difficult. Law-enforcement agencies use all means at their disposal, including sophisticated investigative techniques. Despite these efforts, criminals can escape prosecution because gathering the evidence necessary to identify them online is very difficult; for example, an attacker might use spoofed IP addresses that are very difficult to trace. Many online attackers have been apprehended, but many more – including those who spread MSBlast.A and Sobig – remain unfound.

To supplement online investigations, Microsoft has announced an old-fashioned criminal-justice tactic to help solve a modern-day problem — a monetary reward.Initially funded by Microsoft with US$5 million, the Anti-Virus Reward Program will help the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret Service, in coordination with Interpol, to identify and arrest those who commit crimes by illegally unleashing malicious viruses and worms on the Internet. In particular, Microsoft is offering two rewards of $250,000 each for information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for launching the MSBlast.A worm and Sobig virus.

View: Q&A: Microsoft Establishes Anti-Virus Reward Program

Archive 10

Research shows using multiple anti-virus engines yields the most effective protection. Analysis of the results from five independent testing organizations shows no single anti-virus engine is effective across the spectrum of email threats.

The data from the research paper, “One Virus Engine is Not Enough”, shows that no single product catches a comprehensive range of email viruses and malware within a variety of compressed and uncompressed file formats. A more secure approach must employ multiple anti-virus engines to cover a broader spectrum of threats.

The professional anti-virus testing laboratories (ICSA Labs, West Coast Labs, Virus Bulletin, AV-Test.org, and Virus TestCenter) looked at the leading anti-virus engines – namely, those developed by Trend Micro, Symantec (Norton), McAfee, Norman, and SOFTWIN – for their overall virus detection rate, their ability to scan through compressed and embedded files, and their coverage of non-virus malware. Each product showed strengths in different areas, meaning that combining the capabilities of two or more products would enable organizations to make up for deficiencies in any single product.

View: One Virus Engine Is Not Enough
Thanks to: MSD2D.com

Microsoft will announce on Wednesday that it will offer two $250,000 bounties for information that leads to the arrest of the people who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus, CNET News.com has learned.

The two programs attacked computers that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, causing havoc among companies and home users in August and September. The reward, confirmed by sources in both the security industry and in law enforcement, will be announced in a joint press conference with the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and Interpol that’s scheduled for 10 a.m. EST Wednesday.

The rewards are the first time a company has offered money for information about the identity of the cybercriminals.

View: Microsoft to offer bounty on hackers

In this presentation learn how to protect your PC by taking three simple steps.

Download: Protect Your PC (57MB video)

Office 2003 Critical Update: KB828041 offers the highest levels of reliability available for Microsoft Office 2003. This update fixes an issue in Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Excel 2003 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 that occurs when opening a file last edited and saved in Office 2000. Under this specific scenario it is possible for graphic content to be inadvertently lost on save. The Office 2003 Critical Update: KB828041 is part of Microsoft’s continued effort to provide the latest product updates to customers.

View: Overview of the Office 2003 Critical Update

Microsoft recommends that you use the Office Update site to determine if your computer requires this update before installing it.
A full-file administrative update for use by IT Administrators is available on the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit Web site.

Download: Office2003-KB828041 client (English)
Download: Office2003-KB828041 client (different language)
Download: Office2003-KB828041 administrative (English)
Download: Office2003-KB828041 administrative (different language)

Don’t employ former hackers to safeguard systems, warn experts.

Companies should stop hiring hackers to beef up security – not for ethical reasons but because they are no good at it, according to experts.
Delegates at the RSA Security Conference in Amsterdam heard a panel of reformed hackers, police officers, members of the legal profession and corporate security experts launch scathing attacks on the abilities of most hackers.

The skills that make a good hacker are not the same as those required by an IT security officer, delegates were told. “Everyone thinks that if you know how to break into a system then you must know how to protect one. It’s rubbish. I could teach a monkey to break into a system in four hours,” claimed Ira Winkler, chief security strategist at Hewlett Packard. “While there are highly skilled technical hackers out there, they are the ones you never know about because they don’t get caught.”

But most hackers are IT professionals in their 20s and 30s, suggesting that companies may be late in their realisation that cyber-poachers do not make good cyber-gamekeepers. “Why would you want to employ a hacker with a criminal record, i.e. someone so bad they’d been caught?” asked Tony Neate, industry liaison officer at the National High Tech Crime Unit. “After all, if a bank is looking to employ a security guard they don’t try and find a former bank robber to guard their safe. Companies must be sure that they know their staff’s backgrounds.”

Checking employees was highlighted as essential, but there was a gap in the law as juvenile criminal records are sealed when the perpetrator reaches adulthood. But a quick search of the internet using a web or newsgroup search engine should reveal details of a person’s hacking history, if it exists.

View: Ex-hackers ‘rubbish at security’

This product shows the great results you can get when you customize a Windows SharePoint Services-based Web site using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003. This template contains the custom Theme used in creating this site, and detailed instructions and necessary files to allow you to reproduce the look on your own Windows SharePoint Services-based site. For more inspiration, information and tools to help you customize Windows SharePoint Services-based Web sites with FrontPage 2003, visit the Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Customization Kit at http://www.sharepointcustomization.com/

Download: Windows SharePoint Services Template Package- Human Resources
Download: Windows SharePoint Services Template Package- Finance
Download: Windows SharePoint Services Template Package- Real Estate
Download: Windows SharePoint Services Template Package- Hospital

A quick and easy way to produce quality graphics and photos for the Web, no programming skill required. Create graphics by simply customizing the professionally designed templates, including animated banner ads, button bars and DHTML menus, headings, web page backgrounds and even complete themed page layouts. And because the templates are vector graphics there is no loss of quality. Webstyle has a built in photo album builder to generate stunning albums in just a few clicks. Webstyle 4 also includes one of the quickest photo editors available, auto thumbnail creation, plus seamless integration with FrontPage. All customers receive a CD which contains the software, over 1600 fully editable templates, tutorial movies and a collection of TrueType fonts.

Download: Xara Webstyle 4 (trial)

Widespread education needed as more consumers are targeted.

Web fraudsters are increasingly targeting consumers with password-confirmation scams, experts have warned.
The scam involves sending emails which purport to come from a service provider asking consumers to confirm their passwords at a website. Customers of several British banks were targeted last month.

The websites are cunningly constructed fakes. Once the password entries are made online thieves collect them. As well as banks, companies like eBay have also been targeted.

“A huge number of people are getting suckered by spoof websites, particularly in the US,” said Scott Schnell, senior vice president of sales and marketing for RSA Security. “Once they use the sites they are losing everything, all their personal information. This problem needs to be addressed.”

Schnell suggested that companies and the press should educate employees and the public respectively. Better identity management would also help, he added. “Someone being lazy or stupid, two essential human traits, can defeat the very latest risk management system,” said Jon Collins, associate at analysts Quocira. “Education is vital, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about technology. When people go to these websites they aren’t thinking properly about threats.”

Financial institutions never ask customers for confidential information via email or to divulge such details at websites linked to by a web address in an email. Genuine banking websites are always prefixed with ‘https’. The ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’ and guarantees that details are being kept confidential.

View: Web hoaxes set to increase

Xara Modules are hosted Web page add-ins providing everything from customized graphics to Web forms and online databases. Other Modules let you edit your photos online and place remotely updatable text within your Web page. Xara Online provides a wide range of free Modules and a 15 day trial of their Premium Modules.

Download: Xara Online FrontPage Extension
View: Xara mainpage

Well the 30th I posted the link to the documentation on “Publishing a SharePoint Site Accessible to External Users”. Today Microsoft released it again!? Same version, same overview, different name, different download location. The last edit in the file was of the 26th so could it be that they simply lost the documentation and had to repost it??? I give them the benefit of the doubt and say “Unlikely”. Nevertheless, here’s the repost.

Many organizations require an efficient way to share files, folders, and resources and easily collaborate on the same document with people outside of the network. Using the Windows SharePoint Services solution in Windows Small Business Server 2003, organizations can now easily collaborate with users outside of the local network to satisfy this business need.
This document does not include information about publishing a SharePoint site accessible to external users using Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server.

Download: Publishing a SharePoint Site Accessible to External Users

Microsoft launched software for Pocket PC devices three years ago in the belief that people wanted to “do more” on mobile devices. In this presentation see the latest devices in 2003 that help you stay in touch while on the go.

Download: Stay in Touch While on the Go WMP presentation (300kbps)

W32.Mimail.C@mm is a Category 3 mass-mailing worm that steals information from infected computers. D and E variants have also reached the surface.

View: Mimail.C
View: Mimail.D
View: Mimail.E
Download: Free removal tool al Mimail versions

Will the dominant communication tool end up going the same way as carrier pigeons?

The future of email as the dominant form of electronic communication and collaboration is becoming less certain as spam and the use of instant messaging (IM) chip away at the technology.
According to analyst IDC, more than 20 billion spam messages are expected to be sent daily worldwide by 2006.

IDC’s report, Worldwide Email Usage Forecast, 2003-2007: Spam and Instant Messaging Take a Bite out of Email, estimates that spam represents just under a third of all external and internal email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, up from 24 per cent in 2002.

The rising torrent of spam is reducing email’s usefulness by forcing users and IT staff to expend time and energy identifying and deleting it, and preventing it from clogging inboxes.

The other prong of the attack against email comes from the value of IM’s immediacy and the growing awareness of its presence in the workplace. But it is rapidly becoming more similar to email in terms of corporate requirements for tracking and archiving of messages.

“To keep email at the collaboration centre stage, email proponents will need to do a better job of helping end-users manage email and use other collaborative tools in conjunction with email,” said Mark Levitt, research vice president for collaborative computing at IDC.

View: Spam and IM threaten email’s future

This updated version fixes an issue with the browsing functionality on Windows 98 and Windows ME.

Download: Outlook 2003 Add-in: Personal Folders Backup (English)
Download: Outlook 2003 Add-in: Personal Folders Backup (different language)

Use a Web camera to easily send and reply with a video email to your friends and family with just two clicks on the Video Email for Outlook 2003.

Download: Outlook 2003 Add-in: Video Email

Archive 9

There could be all sorts of reasons why you want to revert back to an older version of Microsoft Office Outlook. One could be because your demo has expired. Also there could be all sorts of reasons why you need to be compatible with older versions of Microsoft Office Outlook like when your laptop holds a previous version of Outlook while your home computer holds Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.

View: Outlook 2003: Reverting back to /Being compatible with a previous version of Microsoft Office Outlook

Since this question has come up quite a few times now I’ve added it to my FAQ.

View: What is the Winmail.dat file?

This product shows the great results you can get when you customize a Windows SharePoint Services-based Web site using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003. This template contains the custom Theme used in creating this site, and detailed instructions and necessary files to allow you to reproduce the look on your own Windows SharePoint Services-based site. For more inspiration, information and tools to help you customize Windows SharePoint Services-based Web sites with FrontPage 2003, visit the Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Customization Kit at http://www.sharepointcustomization.com/

Download: Windows SharePoint Services Template Package- Legal

Congress recently edged closer to passing the nation’s first law to curb e-mail spam, but those who work under the Internet’s hood are attacking the problem from another angle.

Rather than trying to flag and prohibit unsavory messages, as a Senate bill that passed last week would attempt, they are tinkering with the technical architecture of e-mail so that computers will be able to recognize good mail. Then, the theory goes, it is a relatively simple matter to block all other e-mail from getting through.

For the past nine months, several separate initiatives by technologists at e-mail and Internet provider companies have sought to crack the problem, but solutions have been elusive. A major hurdle is that spammers exploit the very attributes of e-mail that help make it popular: Anyone can send mail directly to anyone else and can do so anonymously if they choose. The result is that it can be difficult to sort good from bad. Not only can spammers devise fictitious Internet addresses to mask their locations, but increasingly they are forging the addresses of legitimate individuals and companies.

Microsoft Corp., America Online, Yahoo Inc. and EarthLink Inc. — the top Internet provider and e-mail account companies that joined together to work on the problem last spring — are close to an announcement on a “trusted sender” system. The approaches by the different groups vary, but they all hinge on retooling e-mail so that servers — the computers that power networks of other computers — can mark mail that is sent as trusted and identify those same characteristics when the e-mail is received.

View: E-Mail Providers Devising Ways to Stop Spam

Many organizations require an efficient way to share files, folders, and resources and easily collaborate on the same document with people outside of the network. Using the Windows SharePoint Services solution in Windows Small Business Server 2003, organizations can now easily collaborate with users outside of the local network to satisfy this business need.
This document does not include information about publishing a SharePoint site accessible to external users using Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server.

Download: Publishing a SharePoint Site Accessible to External Users (updated link to reflect the repost by Microsoft on November 3rd)

Michael Hanscom admits it probably wasn’t the best idea. He thought the photo on his personal blog of Apple computers being offloaded at a Microsoft loading dock might get a couple of smirks from friends. He never imagined it would cost him his job.

THAT’S PRECISELY what he says happened, though. Hanscom has found several minutes of Web fame this week as the latest example of how bloggers’ blend of personal and professional can backfire. Hanscom, who says he has kept an online journal since 1998, worked in Microsoft’s copy shop, taking printing and publishing orders from employees at the software giant’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
On Monday, Hanscom’s manager called him in and showed him an Oct. 23 post that featured a photo of stacked boxes of Apple Macintosh G5 computers under the title, “Even Microsoft wants G5s,” noted he had seen them on the loading dock of the building where he worked and remarked that a couple had fallen off their palettes. The close-cropped photograph reveals little more than a delivery truck and the pile of computers on a loading dock. Though Microsoft remains a target of derision for many Mac users, the company remains a major producer of software for Apple systems.

But the entry still raised hackles with Microsoft security officials, he says, who told his manager they couldn’t ask him to remove the post but instead wanted him off Microsoft premises. “I was told they saw it as a security violation,” says Hanscom, a longtime Mac fan who says he was amused to see Microsoft getting the machines. “I think they might have seen it as derogatory.

echnically, Microsoft didn’t fire Hanscom. The 30-year-old has worked for a temp firm, Todays Staffing, since he moved to Seattle from Anchorage in the summer of 2001 — mostly on contracts for Xerox, which runs Microsoft’s copy service. The Microsoft gig was Hanscom’s second posting with Xerox and he says he saw no hints that anyone was unhappy with his work. “My manager had nothing but good things to say,” Hanscom recalls. Even after he had Hanscom escorted off campus, “he was hoping to help me find something else.”
Microsoft would not comment on Hanscom’s dismissal. Spokeswoman Stacy Drake McCredy said the company did not discuss personnel or security matters.

View full story: Copy shop worker loses position after posting Mac photo
View: http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2003/10/even_microsoft_.html

PDC attendees talk about what areas they’d like to see Microsoft researching, and Rick Rashid shares his thoughts on the advances in traditional and non-traditional computer systems.

Eric Rudder talks about how developers can prepare for WinFX, and Gordon Mangione discusses important features in Yukon.

Download: PDC Highlights Day Two

Proposed new law is a start, but flawed, even advocates admit.

The first federal antispam law may be on its way to reality, but many antispam advocates say it won’t stem the flood into e-mail users’ in-boxes.

The Senate unanimously approved the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act last week. It requires e-mail users to opt out of unwanted commercial e-mail, instead of requiring e-mail senders to get permission before sending. That approach is backwards, say vendors of antispam technologies and at least one consumer advocacy group.

Only Partly There
The bill gives consumers little control over spam, says Ray Everett-Church, counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). Everett-Church says he is encouraged that the bill includes an amendment requiring the Federal Trade Commission to consider a national do-not-spam e-mail registry, but it doesn’t require the FTC to actually implement such a list.

A 1991 law authorized the Federal Communications Commission to create a national do-not-call telemarketing registry, which took effect in early October–12 years later, Everett-Church notes. The FTC has expressed concerns about creating and maintaining a massive do-not-spam list, and CAN-SPAM’s opt-out approach basically lets spammers continue to e-mail until they’re told to stop, he adds.

“Until the FTC decides whether or not they care to create a do-not-e-mail list, [CAN-SPAM] creates essentially carte blanche permission for spammers to send unlimited quantities of e-mail to the consumer,” Everett-Church says. “I’m deeply concerned that we may never see a do-not-e-mail list, and until such a time as we do, we will see an unlimited right to see spam.”

View: CAN-SPAM Law Won’t, Critics Say

Write it down in your Outlook Calendar and set a reminder for it as the new patch policy from Microsoft means that patches are released at the end of the month unless they are severe (then they are generally available within 24 hours).

This month there are updates for updates;

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-042: Buffer Overflow in Windows Troubleshooter ActiveX Control Could Allow Code Execution (826232)
Maximum Severity Rating: Critical
Recommendation: Customers should apply the patch immediately

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-043: Buffer Overrun in Messenger Service Could Allow Code Execution (828035)
Maximum Severity Rating: Critical
Recommendation: Customers should disable the Messenger Service immediately and evaluate their need to deploy the patch

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-045: Buffer Overrun in the ListBox and in the ComboBox Control Could Allow Code Execution (824141)
Maximum Severity Rating: Important
Recommendation: Customers should install this security patch at the earliest opportunity

Run Windows Update!

Check out some of the activities of the first day of the PDC. Attendees talk about what they are learning and excited about and Robert Hess interviews Jim Allchin about what he’s most excited about with Longhorn.

Should we make fun of the guy that thinks Yukon will be the one after Longhorn…???

Download: PDC Highlights – Day One

For the people addicted to the MSN6 games mess.be has developed some custom games and have updated their patch for the final release of MSN 6.1 (build 6.1.0155). Next to the default games from MSN you’ll have; Chess, Nine Men’s Morris, Reversi, Sea Battle, Yahtzee and Tetris as extra games available from the Launch Site button. You need to have your MSN6 closed before you apply the patch. Also the person you want to play with must have the patch applied.

Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 (English)
Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 (different language)
Download: Mess.be Games Patch v0.5
View: Mess.be games site

Freelance writer and software developer Eric Wilson has spent a decade supporting, writing about and developing Microsoft platforms. But last week he warned that buyers of Microsoft’s Office 2003, released last week, might be breaching his intellectual property rights.

Wilson, who writes regularly for Next, said technology in Office 2003 infringed patents he had applied for and, in an action reminiscent of the global recording and movie industries’ approach to piracy, said he would bypass Microsoft and instead pursue its customers for “additional royalties and special conditions”.

Microsoft Australia’s director of corporate and legal affairs, Chris Woodforde, said the software company was “very confident” no claim would succeed against Microsoft or its customers. He said that if Microsoft needed technology from a developer, they would buy it and not risk infringement.

“Eric’s a very respected developer and we’ve taken what he has to say very seriously,” Woodforde said.

“We’ve evaluated his claim and fully investigated and don’t agree with it.

“He has no issued patent and the reader view technology was available before he sought his patent.

“As a company that relies on intellectual property, we respect intellectual property rights . . . and if we thought there was going to be any liability to our customers we would do something about it. If this technology was available we would buy it.”

Full story: Developer claims rights breach in Office 2003

Bill Gates turned 48 today.

Virus firms warn of new email attachment-based malware.

A new virus threat called Sober could be causing a few headaches today, according to antivirus researchers.
The Sober worm, spotted in the last 12 hours, is a traditional attachment-based piece of malware that uses social engineering to trick people into activating its payload.

In contrast with the Flea virus discovered last week, which so far appears to have failed to bite, Sober hides its code in an HTML email. Microsoft Outlook users can activate the payload just by opening the email.

View article: Sober worm causes headaches
View: Info on Sober at Symantec

Archive 8

Microsoft Office 2003 leaves resellers largely unmoved.

The channel is not expecting a rush of corporate interest following last week’s launch of the Microsoft Office 2003 suite.
Although the launch is vital for Microsoft, as Office sales account for over a quarter of the company’s revenue, resellers do not believe there will be a spike in initial upgrade interest.

The new suite includes upgrades to the existing applications and new extensible mark-up language applications based around information sharing and collaborative working.

John Taylor, marketing director at VAR Trustmarque, said: “Some large companies may decide to upgrade immediately, but in general we’ll see a slow but steady rise in companies making the switch.

“The product has improved, but I’m not sure if it’s improved enough to be an essential upgrade.”

Angela Ashenden, senior analyst at Ovum, said the tight integration of the product would benefit resellers.

“This tight integration makes a lot of sense for Microsoft, but to get the benefits users should have the latest upgrades to get full functionality,” she said.

View article: Office has work to do

Yesterday evening I got my hands on the latest leaked copy of Longhorn (build 4051). I messed something with the files so it would take my Windows 2003 Beta key to install with and made it bootable so I could do a clean install on one of my test systems (it was about time that expired Exchange 2003 RC1 got formatted anyway).

After I was pleasantly surprised that my tweaking worked at first attempt the installer ran pretty smooth. The install screens are looking quite nice (although the background colours don’t look that good when booting with PXE). Also the hardware detecting wasn’t in the promised 10 minutes (more like half an hour) which is all with all no big deal as it obviously isn’t optimised yet.

When you finally get around to booting it up for the first time you are presented with a new Bliss wallpaper and a new skin called Slate. This skin looks a lot better than the old Plex one which was in previous builds. Slate isn’t, as you probably know already, going to be the final skin; that will be Aero. Also notice that the Start button doesn’t have “Start” on it anymore.

I never actually started up Outlook Express on the previous builds but I did in this. It looks quite nice with the new colours and the navigation is slightly changed. I couldn’t find any new options that fast but it is already marked as Outlook Express 7 although the file versions tell otherwise. The file versions are (as always) the same as those of Internet Explorer. This could be an early indication that there will be no functional development done to Outlook Express. Internet Explorer however did get some functional improvements already with a pop-up blocker as a very welcome new feature.

Screenshots always say more than a thousands words…

Windows Explorer

Games folder

Little error when requesting system info from the new Hardware and Devices overview

New Windows Event Viewer in MMC

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies uses a common set of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 services named Windows SharePoint Services, to take advantage of the performance, stability, and security features of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Use Windows SharePoint Services to create and maintain team sites. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, a server product, is built on Windows SharePoint Services, and adds features used to build and manage integrated, large-scale portal solutions.

Download: SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 SDK: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server

Someone from the Outlook forum came across a quite old KB article where is stated that the article discusses a Beta test product that is not yet announced or released publicly by Microsoft.

View: KB 289988 OL2002: “Ask Me Before Sending a Response” Option for Message Receipt Is Active but Seems Not to Work

World Wide Web Consortium says InfoPath signatures cannot be trusted.

Microsoft and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are at loggerheads over competing standards for electronic forms which help automate business processes.
On Tuesday, Microsoft released InfoPath, its new XML-based application in Office 2003 allowing users to organise and share data.

But the security of its signatures has been called into question on a W3C discussion forum.

The W3C recently released the specification for XForms 1.0, which allows the creation of interactive forms to help automate the exchange of corporate data.

It is being backed by IBM and Sun Microsystems as a more open approach for heterogeneous environments that rely on interoperability.

Dr John Boyer, a research scientist at e-forms specialist PureEdge Solutions, and co-author of the XML DSig standard and the XForms 1.0 recommendation, said that businesses cannot rely on InfoPath signatures for security.

He claimed that, in under five minutes, PureEdge managed to change a signed InfoPath form from an ‘Employment Applicant Rating’ form to a ‘Prisoner Registration’ form.

Read full article: Microsoft in standards battle with W3C

Information rights management functionality could make employees careless, experts warn.

The launch of Microsoft Office 2003 has led to calls for more awareness and better enforcement of corporate email usage policies.
The new information rights management functionality in the latest version of Office is designed to protect against the unintended proliferation of sensitive information.

New features include the ability to limit which recipients can open, edit, copy or even print emails or documents.

But industry experts have warned that this could lull employees into a false sense of security about the management of sensitive corporate information.

Simon Stokes, head of e-commerce law at Tarlo Lyons, told vnunet.com: “The fact that the Microsoft technology allows you to manage email is good, but it does stress the need to have proper data retention and email usage policies and to make sure that employees’ email use is consistent with that.”

Read full article: Office 2003 sparks data retention row

This article describes how to deploy ISA Server 2000 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Feature Pack 1 as your advanced firewall server to protect your messaging environment. Microsoft® Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 are designed to work closely together in your network environment to provide a more secure messaging environment than previous versions of Exchange. When you use ISA Server to handle all inbound requests from client applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 and Outlook Web Access, your Exchange front-end servers no longer need to be located in the perimeter network.

Download: Using ISA Server with Exchange 2003

This reference explains how to use the PDS Application Programming Interface (API) to allow client applications to access Project Server portfolio data. Client applications can programmatically log on to Project Server and use Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to call PDS API methods. The PDS implements a SOAP listener, which receives method calls in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format and returns an XML response.

The PDS reference includes sample code and information about the following:

What’s New in the PDS for Project Server 2003
Using the Project Data Service
The PDS and Project Server Security Architecture
Writing a PDS Extender
PDS Methods XML
Using SOAP to call PDS methods
Programmatic Logon to Project Server
API Reference
Service for Enterprise Data Maintenance (EDM)
Error Codes
PDS Permissions
Field ID Values for Enterprise Custom Fields

Note This PDS reference is provided as a separate download for convenience. The topics are the same as the MSDN online topics in PDS Reference for Microsoft Office Project Server 2003. This PDS reference is also included in the complete Microsoft Office Project 2003 SDK download from the Microsoft Download Center. For additional information on using the PDS, see the complete SDK download or the MSDN online Microsoft Office Project 2003 SDK documentation.

Download: Microsoft Office Project Server 2003: Project Data Service (PDS) Usage and Methods Reference

The Microsoft Office Project 2003 SDK is designed for solution providers, value-added resellers, and other developers to help customize Project 2003, and to extend and integrate Project Server 2003 with other applications for Enterprise Project Management. It features articles, programming references, tools, and sample code, including extensive articles called Solution Starters.

Microsoft Office Project 2003 SDK contents:
Solution Starters provide extensive documentation and working applications with source code that show how to build and install extensions to integrate other applications with Project Server. All of the Solution Starters use components developed with the Project Data Service (PDS), and source code for PDS Extenders. The Solution Starters currently available are:

BizTalk Server Workflow Solution Starter integrates timesheet data using Microsoft BizTalk® Server with Project Server to enable quick changes in business workflow processes. The sample includes PDS Extenders that synchronize timesheet management between BizTalk and Project Server.
Project Server to Siebel Solution Starter integrates Project Server with the Siebel CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application. The sample includes a PDS Extender to generate projects in Project Server 2003 from sales opportunity and resource data in Siebel, a Siebel Business Service extension to synchronize Siebel with data from Project Server.

Project Data Service (PDS) Reference: The PDS is an extensible XML-based Application Programming Interface (API) for Project Server. The PDS Reference includes test tools and code templates for developing PDS Extenders and components that integrate with Project Server.

Project Server Integration includes the following articles:

Integration with InfoPath shows how Microsoft® Office InfoPath™ 2003 can be integrated with Project Server 2003 to bring more visibility, control, and participation to Enterprise Project Management.
Object Link Provider Reference: This section of the SDK contains information about the properties, methods, and interfaces of the Object Link Provider, to help extend the integration of Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint™ Services with Project Server

Download: Microsoft Office Project 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK)

The tool PSMigrat.exe is used to migrate Microsoft Project Server 2002 data from SharePoint Team Services to Windows SharePoint Services. PSMigrat.exe extracts the subweb information from SharePoint Team Services into one or more FWP files. For each site, PSMigrat.exe packages all of the site content (including documents and issues) into a CAB file and expands the file to perform additional operations. Then the tool SMIGRATE.EXE is run by PSMigrat.exe to add this information to the server running Windows SharePoint Services.

Download: Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 PSMIGRAT Utility

This product shows the great results you can get when you customize a Windows SharePoint Services-based Web site using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003. This template contains the custom Theme used in creating this site, and detailed instructions and necessary files to allow you to reproduce the look on your own Windows SharePoint Services-based site. For more inspiration, information and tools to help you customize Windows SharePoint Services-based Web sites with FrontPage 2003, visit the Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Customization Kit at http://www.sharepointcustomization.com/

Download: Windows SharePoint Services Template Package- High School

Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Microsoft Corp., today issued this statement in support of the U.S. Senate passage of the Burns-Wyden anti-spam bill:

“Microsoft is pleased with today’s passage of S. 877, the Senate anti-spam legislation championed by Senators Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore. This bill is an important step in reducing the volume of spam by helping to stave off unsolicited and fraudulent e-mail that erodes trust in technology for consumers and costs businesses billions of dollars a year. Microsoft particularly supports the bill’s strong enforcement provisions that will better enable ISPs to prosecute spammers on behalf of their customers. In addition, today’s Senate action strengthens the protection of children online from illicit and pornographic e-mail, and with an amendment by Senators Hatch (R-UT) and Leahy (D-VT) it increases the criminal penalties for those who intentionally mislead or deceive consumers. These provisions not only make the overall bill stronger, but help give parents more peace of mind that stiff penalties have been put in place to ward off criminals and to better protect children on the Internet.

View PressPass: Microsoft Praises Senate for Passage of Burns-Wyden Anti-Spam Bill

Windows Messenger also got an update to build 5.0.0468.

Download: Windows Messenger (English)
Download: Windows Messenger (different Language)

Like mentioned yesterday MSN Messenger has gone final today. The final build number is 6.1.0155.

Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 (English)
Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 (different language)

The Microsoft Visio IFilter 2003 is a component used by the Microsoft Windows Indexing service and Microsoft Office SharePoint™ Portal Server 2003 to extract text strings from Microsoft Visio files (.VSD, .VSS, .VST, .VDX, .VSX, and .VTX formats). The text strings are then indexed by these servers and the resulting indices are made available to several client applications that provide a user interface to search for text strings in files. These search clients include Visio 2003 Find Shape, Windows 2000 and Windows XP File Explorer search, Office 2003 search, Microsoft Windows SharePoint™ Services 2003 search, and SharePoint Portal Server search.

Download: Visio IFilter 2003 Add-in: Text Search in Visio Files

Archive 7

A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to run programs and access data on a computer running Microsoft® Exchange Server 5.5 Outlook® Web Access. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft.

Read: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-047
Download: Security Update for Exchange 5.5 (KB828489) (English)
Download: Security Update for Exchange 5.5 (KB828489) (different language)

Creating contacts is easy and before you know it you’ve got several dozen, hundreds of them in your Contacts folder. It is very likely that some of them have relations with one another like the same company. If you want to store company info with the contacts you just don’t want to open every contact and add the same information to it. Even worse; do you want to change the address for every contact when the company relocates? I know I wouldn’t!

The following method describes an easy way to manage general information for contacts that are linked with one another in some way.

View: How To Manage General Information For Multiple Contacts

Users who are counting on locking down document permissions via Office will have to work with beta RMS components for now.

When Microsoft officially takes the wraps off its Office System 2003 family on Tuesday morning, the company will be launching six different versions of its desktop suite, four new Office System servers and one service (its Live Meeting Web conferencing offering).

But there will be one offering missing from its line up: Its Windows Rights Management Services solution.

Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) —and its Office implementation, known as Information Rights Management — is the technology that Microsoft has developed to increase user control over documents and data. While RMS is technically a member of the Windows Server 2003 System family, not the Office System, it is via Office 2003 that most users will get their first taste of RMS.

Microsoft has been talking up its rights-management plans since earlier this spring. But the final RMS products just missed the cut-off date to be part of the Office System launch, say sources.

The RMS client has been available for download from Microsoft’s Web site since early September, and a near-final release of the RMS server has been downloadable since mid-September. The Rights Management add-on for Internet Explorer component of the RMS solution went to beta test in May.

Sources close to the company say that Microsoft could release its RMS solution to manufacturing as early as this week, and be launched officially early next month.

A Microsoft spokesman said that RMS is “still on schedule to go before end of calendar year 2003,” and declined to provide further specifics.

Microsoft has signed up a number of software and services partners who plan to support its RMS products. EDS, Avenade, Digex, Reciprocal and Omniva all are working on offerings that will build around RMS.

One Microsoft services partner, GigaMedia Access, announced on Tuesday a beta version of its RMS-related offering. The GigaTrust managed service (available for both individuals and enterprises) is designed to extend RMS to support clients other than Office 2003. GigaTrust will allow Windows XP and Windows 2000 clients to author and consume rights-management-protected content, company officials say, in a secure way.

GigaMedia is working on providing other rights-enabled portal-based content, say company officials, and are working to add rights-managed support for mobile devices.

View: No Final Rights-Management Support for Office 2003 — Yet

Earlier I posted you the tutorials for Producer 2003. Now that the Office 2003 suite has been released Producer is final as well and ready for download in several languages

Download: Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 (English)
Download: Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 (different language)
View: Producer 2003 Tutorials

A 60-day evaluation copy of Microsoft Office OneNote is also available now for download.

Download or order: 60-day evaluation copy of OneNote 2003

Because tomorrow should be the launch of the new MSN 9 Explorer which will include the final MSN Messenger 6.1

Download: MSN MEssenger 6.1 Beta build 6.1.0150

Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of the new Microsoft® Office System, along with research that shows how leading companies are already gaining a competitive advantage from Microsoft Office System productivity solutions. The research, conducted for Microsoft by Navigant Consulting Inc. (NYSE “NCI”), showed that information workers using the solutions gained an average of two hours in productive time each week without working longer hours, that the companies realized a median net present value of $4,000 per worker, and that the solutions paid for themselves in an average of just eight months. (Full details of the new research can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/officesystemlaunch.)

With six suites, 11 products, four servers, one service and Solution Accelerators, the new Microsoft Office System is evidence of Microsoft’s focus on helping information workers, the teams they work on, and the companies they work for become more productive and achieve their goals. The Microsoft Office System consists of the 2003 versions of the core Office suites and programs; updates to other information work programs such as Visio®, FrontPage®, Publisher and Project; two completely new programs, Microsoft Office OneNote™ and Microsoft Office InfoPath™; and four servers, including the new Office Live Communications Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003. Added to that are additional services, such as Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and solutions that help people and their organizations make greater use of information, collaborate more effectively, and easily integrate business processes to increase individual, team and organizational productivity.

“The new Office System is a major leap forward for information workers,” said Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft. “It makes information work more productive — and more profitable — by offering innovative new ways to communicate, to find and share information, and to manage complex projects.”

office2003

Microsoft Office System Launch Event with Bill Gates
56K | 100K | 300K

New Office Website
http://office.microsoft.com

Highlights on the website:

Product Info

Why is the new Office worth a look?

Read the overview

Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Office Professional Edition 2003

Get trial version

Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting
Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting is an integrated set of software components and prescriptive documentation that makes the recruiting process more efficient for recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers and recruiting assistants. It accomplishes this by enabling companies to quickly schedule interviews, create on-line customized interview plans and easily capture feedback on candidate performance.

Microsoft Accelerator for Six Sigma
Microsoft Accelerator for Six Sigma is an integrated set of products and services customized for Six Sigma practitioners. The accelerator can help Six Sigma project teams more effectively manage a large number of projects, more easily track their financial impact, optimize and track resources, and electronically share knowledge gathered across the enterprise. By helping the customer focus on reducing costs, business cycle times, and solving business problems using Six Sigma projects, the accelerator enables companies to effectively manage Six Sigma initiatives across the enterprise.

A judge sentenced an Arizona woman to 60 days home detention for intercepting her husband’s ex-wife’s e-mail, saying the penalty is a warning to others who might be tempted to do the same.

“Privacy is still a cherished value,” U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch said in sentencing Angel Lee, 28, of El Mirage, Arizona.

Lee pleaded guilty in March and admitted accessing at least 215 e-mails sent last year to her husband’s ex-wife, Duongladde Ramsay.

Officials said she fraudulently obtained the user name and password information for Ramsay’s e-mail account.

Matsch, best known for his role overseeing the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, bombing trials, has said the e-mail case involved a vicious divorce dispute over children. At Lee’s sentencing Friday, he said he considered sending her to jail but believed she needed to be home with her young children.

“I really apologize for what I did,” Lee told the judge. “She (Ramsay) has a right to feel the way she feels.”

Ramsay has compared Lee’s actions to someone breaking into her home and reading her diary.

View at CNN: Woman sentenced for reading e-mail of husband’s ex-wife

MICROSOFT LAUNCHES its latest upgrade to the all-conquering Orifice suite of programs tomorrow, and one of the features incorporated into the new Outlook will be an email “self-destruct” function, which, it seems, it could have done with during its court battle with the US Department of Justice.
During that trial, the court ordered Microsoft to hand over thousands of old emails, some of which turned up some very interesting stuff about how the Vole actively worked to annihilate its competitors.

Microsoft reckons its use of “Information Rights Management” to determine who is allowed to see emails and by which date emails should be deleted is supposed to increase security. We here, however, as journalists and chroniclers of the age, suggest that the software decreases security by allowing revisionist versions of our current history to appear, as the original documents are digitally shredded.

Even in the US, destroying emails can be a federal offence. Indeed, just this year brokers Morgan Stanley were fined $1.65m for failing to keep proper e-mail records.

View: New Microsoft Office allows emails to self destruct

On Tuesday, Oct. 21, at events in New York City and worldwide, Microsoft launches the new Microsoft Office System, a system of productivity programs, servers, services and solutions that help connect people and organizations to information, business processes and each other. PressPass is assembling a package of feature articles, transcripts, and virtual newsrooms to assist journalists.

Go to: Microsoft Office System Launch Virtual Pressroom

The USPS Electronic Postmark (USPS EPM) is a web-based service that allows users to digitally sign and timestamp electronic documents within Microsoft Word. This electronic proof, digitally signed by the US Postal Service, provides evidence to support non-repudiation of electronic transactions. The USPS EPM is designed to detect the tampering or altering of electronic data. This service is integrated as a Word extension within Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft Office XP.

Click to go to the United States Postal Service Web site.

Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 makes it easy to capture, synchronize, and publish audio, video, slides, and images. Producer 2003 is the current version of this popular add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint and is the ideal tool for creating engaging presentations, training, and business communications.

Download: Producer 2003 Final Release Candidate
View: Producer 2003 Tutorials

FrontLook DWT Browser enables you to acquire, browse and manage your Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 compatible Dynamic Web Templates (DWTs). Two Sample DWTs included.

There are three main components to the FrontLook DWT.

Browser: DWT Online Browser – enables you to browse and install online DWTs.

DWT Manager / Browser – enables you to browse and view the list of available DWTs on your hard drive. It also copies the DWT to the current web so that you can customize the DWT for that web without affecting the other webs that might use that DWT.

Two Sample DWTs to use on one of your webs.

Download: DWT Browser w/ Sample DWTs

Learn about Microsoft Office Access 2003 by using these sample files in conjunction with the article “New XML Features of Microsoft Office Access 2003” available on MSDN. See Related Links for more information.

This download contains several sample files. You can modify these sample templates to fit your needs.

Download: New XML Features in Microsoft Office Access 2003 Sample

Archive 6

With Live Communications Server 2003, people can connect to each other and to information instantly, whenever and wherever they need to. Live Communications Server 2003 offers a secure, reliable and easy-to-manage alternative to publicly available instant-messaging (IM) services. Enterprises can take advantage of the productivity gains that make IM popular, while helping to protect valuable intellectual property and corporate privacy.

Download: Live Communications Server 2003 Document: Reference Guide
The Reference Guide details the client configuration and policies, reference hardware and environment, Active Directory® directory service, and Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation extensions that are installed as part of Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003.

Download: Live Communications Server 2003 Document: Release Notes 1.0a
The Release Notes Update contains new information for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 Standard Edition.

Download: Live Communications Server 2003 Document: Migration Guide
The Migration Guide provides a migration guide for organizations making the important move from Microsoft Exchange 2000 Instant Messaging to Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 Standard Edition.

Download: Live Communications Server 2003 Document: Deployment Guide
The Deployment Guide explains how to implement the best practices for planning, designing, migrating to, and deploying Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 Standard Edition in your enterprise.

Early Adopter Customers Report An Average Productivity Gain of 25 Percent

Microsoft Corp. today announced that American Management Systems Inc. (AMS), Graphic Packaging International Inc., Honeywell International Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Virgin Entertainment are among the companies now achieving greater individual, team and organizational productivity using Microsoft’s communication and collaboration solutions. Enterprise companies participating in Microsoft’s early adopter program reported an average productivity gain of 25 percent through use of the communication and collaboration capabilities in the new Microsoft® Office System, which is scheduled for release Oct. 21.

Inefficient, expensive collaboration is a major business challenge in today’s economy. The Microsoft Office System meets the collaboration challenge head-on by delivering easy-to-use programs, servers and services that help streamline communication and encourage collaboration both inside and outside of organizations. Companies are adopting the user-centric technology in the Microsoft Office System as a way to increase individual, team and organizational responsiveness, as well as eliminate inefficiencies inherent in collaboration today. Customers report that the Microsoft Office System provides measured collaborative benefits such as shortening project cycle times, reducing the number of meetings teams have inside their organizations by one-third, cutting operating costs from 10 percent to 20 percent, and increasing customer satisfaction, customer retention and revenue generation by as much as 20 percent.

Microsoft products that contribute to enhanced end-user communication and collaboration include the 2003 editions of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office SharePoint (TM) Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Microsoft Office Project 2003 and Microsoft Office Project Server 2003, and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003.

Read full article at PressPass: Information Workers at Companies Using Microsoft Office System Improve Communication and Collaboration

This zip files cotains all the files and images necessary to get you started in building a sports-related Web site using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003.

Download: Sports- Trading Card Dynamic Web Template

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates believes the computer industry will outgrow spam, and predicts that Wi-Fi will be a key technology both for homes and business.
Speaking at ITU Telecom World 2003, Gates said that Wi-Fi had taken off in the four years since the last event, and that it would find its way quickly into the enterprise and be key to developing the digital home.

“Wi-Fi in the enterprise is on the way to becoming a common sense tool to drive business productivity,” he said.

In residential areas Wi-Fi could drive “the dream” of the digital home, he added.

But security is still a major issue for Microsoft. Gates acknowledged that the “level of richness and maturity” needed to secure the wired and wireless digital world has yet to appear.

Gates said much of Microsoft’s $6.8bn (£4.1bn) investment in research and development was being focused on this area, and suggested radical changes in the way society approaches internet technologies.

He called on anonymity to be removed from internet protocols like SMTP, because it allows spammers to mimic other users, and suggested that passwords could be replaced by smart cards and biometric technologies.

“We have to know who is accessing the network. By being able to identify who the sender is we will be able to make the spam problem essentially go away,” he said.

Gates added that by the end of the decade the majority of homes in most developed countries will be connected to the internet by broadband.As Wi-Fi had been a surprise in the last four years, the service opportunities offered by broadband would “surprise us all”, he said.

One such service, IP-TV, would be offered by all major broadband operators this decade. IP-TV would offer a much richer user interface than TV “as we historically know it”, he added.

Read article at VNUnet: Gates foretells death of spam

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Migration Tool
SMIGRATE helps you migrate to Windows SharePoint Services from SharePoint Team Services when upgrading to Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 from Microsoft Project Server 2002.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 In-Box Documentation
Documentation about various Project data formats and setup scenarios that can be used out-of-the-box.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 ConnInfo Utility
The ConnInfo tool ensures that Project Server administrators maintain user roles and registry settings when moving Project Server data to a new database server.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 Restore Single Project Tool
RestoreP can backup a single project from a saved backup and restore it to the Project Server database.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 WinHTTP Proxy Configuration tool
Proxycfg is required to configure proxy settings for Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 deployments.

And on top of the just released Rollup package comes some additional critical fixes.

MS03-047 : Vulnerability in Exchange Server 5.5 Outlook Web Access Could Allow Cross-Site Scripting Attack (828489)

MS03-046 : Vulnerability in Exchange Server Could Allow Arbitrary Code Execution (822363)

MS03-045 : Buffer Overrun in the ListBox and in the ComboBox Control Could Allow Code Execution (824141)

MS03-044 : Buffer Overrun in Windows Help and Support Center Could Lead to System Compromise (825119)

MS03-043 : Buffer Overrun in Messenger Service Could Allow Code Execution (828035)

MS03-042 : Buffer Overflow in Windows Troubleshooter ActiveX Control Could (826232)

MS03-041 : Vulnerability in Authenticode Verification Could Allow Remote Code Execution (823182)

Run Windows Update

It’s here!!! Finally

This update consists of previously released critical updates, for Windows XP, rolled into one convenient package. Installing this item provides you the same results as installing the individual updates. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Download: Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Windows XP (English)
Download: Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Windows XP (different language)

This patch resolves problems that were found in the Exchange Server 5.5 Information Store since SP4 was released.

Using the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 client to modify rules or to import rules into a mailbox that is located on a Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 computer can result in a server-side rule with a malformed property. The execution of rules in this condition may cause the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service to unexpectedly stop responding.

More info: Information Store Intermittently Stops Responding and an Access Violation Occurs in EcDSDNFromSz (829418)
Download: Exchange 5.5 Information Store Patch 2657.74 (English)
Download: Exchange 5.5 Information Store Patch 2657.74 (different language)

Today I went to the TechNet MSDN Briefings 2003 in The Hague. Bill Gates was special host at this briefing to talk about the vision of Microsoft and how they created software with that vision and what will be the next steps for the coming years to pursue that vision even more.

Getting to The Hague was a hard task as the NS (Dutch Railways) were on a strike and no train stopped between Rotterdam and Leiden (The Hague is in between for the ones with no topographical knowledge of The Netherlands). Getting in the wrong room with just executives of companies that are Microsoft partners was real easy; I was there very early and with just nothing to do me and my friend just starting to walk around in the building to see if there was anything to do. With two security guards at every door we figured that if we went to places we shouldn’t be going we probably get halted. The reality was different; when we saw a fancy room with loads of people we just walked in. In fact we even got greeted by the security guards!

After a cup of tea a conference room opened and we got a presentation by a company that analyzes the behaviour of people and translates that into the vision of people in general. This presentation was followed by one from Bill Gates! I’ll spare you the details of the presentation as the pictures of the most important slides will speak for themselves.

Because we were in the Executives Circle session we missed the Key Note for the general public as the large conference room was completely sealed when Bill Gates entered (yep, now security worked!). All with all not too bad as he gave kind of the same presentation which we could follow outside on a TV screen. Quite fun to see him do the same presentation directly again after the first one.

The rest of the day I attended the following sessions;

Exchange Server 2003: mobility, RPC over HTTP and migration explained
Windows 2000 Active Directory Diagnostics, Troubleshooting and Recovery
Windows 2000 Security

I also included some pictures of the most important slides of the Exchange session.

I’ll post the full presentations when I’ve got them available.

View: Pictures of Bill Gates at the TechNet MSDN Briefings 2003 in The Hague

NetStores E-Commerce Add-Ins For FrontPage give Web Designers and Site Builders the tools to quickly add complete e-commerce capabilities including: shopping cart, search features, quick search, add to cart, and many ordering capabilities for conducting E-commerce. With the NetStores E-Commerce Solution, designers can quickly build and customize a Web site integrated with credit card processing, B2B, B2C, merchant accounts, without the need for additional software for their hosting platform.

Download: NetStores FrontPage E-commerce Add-in for FrontPage 2000 and 2002

In this edition of Insider, hosts Ari Bixhorn and Chris Flores give you an in-depth preview of the new Microsoft® Office System.

Learn how the new Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 can save you time and help you work more productively. Watch demonstrations of new and revamped Office technologies, plus see the new Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 in action. Listen to Robert Rounthwaite as he discusses how Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 can help you combat junk e-mail, then watch a demo of the program so you can see for yourself.

Preview one of the best parts of the new Office: Microsoft Office OneNote™ 2003. See how it will completely change the way you take notes. Then watch how it works with a Tablet PC to make your standard notepad and pen virtually obsolete.

Download: Microsoft Insider: Office System Preview for Windows Media Player 9 (55MB)

Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 uses the Project Server Tracing Service to log application errors to the Event Viewer. The Project Server SetTracing Utility also allows you to redirect the tracing output to a log file, or to the Event Viewer and a log file. Directing application errors to a log file will output the errors to a format that you can send to Microsoft Product Support Services, making it easier for them to help determine the cause or causes of any errors your organization may be running into.

Download: Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 SetTracing Utility

Microsoft Is Providing the Tools and Technologies Developers Need To Build Next Generation of Solutions for the Office System

Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® Tools for the Microsoft Office System, which brings the power and productivity of Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework to business solutions built on the latest versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Office is the most broadly used client application in the world, used or customized by nearly 3 million developers and over 400 million users. With today’s launch, Microsoft is now providing professional developer customers with the compelling developer tools that they need to take advantage of the power and flexibility of the .NET Framework in their Office-based solutions.

In addition, the Microsoft Office Access 2003 Developer Extensions will be paired with Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System and offered at an upgrade price to users of the previous Office Developer Edition products. The Access Developer Extensions provide the tools and resources developers need to more quickly and easily create, test and deploy sophisticated Microsoft Access solutions.

“Developers wanting to build solutions for Word and Excel will find greater productivity with Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System,” said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the Servers and Tools group at Microsoft. “The customization opportunities offered by Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System will help businesses achieve faster time to market for their internal and external applications.”

Read full Press Release: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System

Quite a critical article about the new Microsoft Office 2003 Family;

Getting the most out of Microsoft’s imminent Office upgrade will require a host of other software updates

Firms wanting to reap the productivity and collaborative benefits of Microsoft’s Office System, which launches on 21 October, should be prepared for a long haul, according to experts.

“To gain full functionality, firms will have to switch their whole environment to Server 2003, SharePoint Portal 2003 and Exchange 2003,” said Clive Longbottom of analyst Quocirca. “Desktops should be the last piece of the puzzle.”

Longbottom said firms would need to set up good policies and procedures for collaboration with automated access rights to shared documents. He added that some firms would have to train staff to XML-enable documents.

Collaborative functionality is the jewel in the crown for the revamped Office, said Longbottom. “But Office will not become a corporate tool without changing procedures,” he added. “It is up to firms to decide where the value lies and how to make it work.”

Read article at VNUnet: Big changes for Office

I did some updating on my site over the weekend and I added Google search functionality to my website. The search link is added to the navigation.

I also changed all the pages of this web to reflect the style used on the main page and to have navigation as well.

Hope you like it!

Archive 5

Information worker productivity is at a tipping point, becoming a workspace for innovation, integration and teams, with Microsoft itself making a major transition and working with its partners to make this happen, Jeff Raikes, Microsoft’s group vice president on productivity and business solutions, said Friday.

Addressing several thousand attendees at the Worldwide Partner Conference, he took a swipe at Linux, open source and StarOffice, saying, “they simply accept the view that what they have is good enough. That view does not foster innovation. Being where we were with Office 1997 is not good enough for us,” he said.

Microsoft Office 2003 shows the new potential of information worker productivity, where services come together to dramatically enhance what people can do together, said Raikes.

Microsoft will release more products around information worker productivity this year than it has ever released before, with nearly 50,000 Microsoft employees already using Office 2003 internally, Raikes said.

Randy Schilling, president of Microsoft partner Quilogy Inc., took the stage to share his experience with Office System so far, saying it has fundamentally changed his business and the way it went to market. Quilogy’s customers wanted a simpler solution, and Office System offered them that, he said.

The company is already implementing solutions on top of Office System; for example, at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital it has simplified and reduced the number of applications used by nurses, doctors and staff from 60 to 10, Schilling said.

Read full article at eWeek: Microsoft’s Raikes Touts Office 2003; Takes Swing at Linux

The Microsoft Project 2002: System Policy Editor and Templates download includes the Microsoft Project 2002 system policy template. You must install the System Policy Editor and the template on your computer before you can create a system policy file.

Using the System Policy Editor, you can control which Microsoft Project 2002 options are available to your users. You can create system policies and easily distribute the settings from a central administrative installation point.

You need to have the Office XP Resource Kit installed before installing this download.

Download: Office XP Resource Kit
Download: Microsoft Project 2002: System Policy Editor and Templates

Sothink Glanda is a template-based tool designed to create Flash movies for your Web site in a fast and easy way. With a few mouse clicks, you can create a variety of animated effects such as buttons, navigation, splash pages, graphic logos. A WYSIWYG design panel and an integrated preview makes creation easy. It supplies hundreds of well-designed templates including animated buttons, text effects, motion backgrounds and greeting cards so you don’t have to start from scratch. A User manual is included in the software package.

Download: Sothink Glanda: Template-based Tool to Create Flash Movies (trial version)

Sothink DHTMLMenu can help Web designers create professional DHTML pop-up menus for Web pages without writing a single line of code.

Sothink DHTMLMenu generates robust code that works with different Web browsers. This eliminates browser compatibility problems. The pop-up menu can be fully customizable by changing the text, font, link, background, bullets, border style, pop-up effect and so on.

Sothink DHTMLMenu provides many pre-made effects, themes and templates.

Download: Sothink DHTMLMenu

This download contains information about managing Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, including:

Planning
Deployment Scenarios
Installation
Security
Configuration
Administration
Backup and Migration
Maintenance
Customization
Troubleshooting
Reference

Note This guide is a compiled Help file and opens in HTML Help.

Download: Windows SharePoint Services Administrator’s Guide

Download the construction update to keep your maps current in Streets and Trips. Save the file in the Data folder, located where you installed the program files for MapPoint or Streets & Trips. I.e. C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Data\.

Download: MapPoint 2001 and Streets & Trips 2001 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2002 and Streets & Trips 2002 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2003 and Streets & Trips 2003 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2004 and Streets & Trips 2004 Construction Update

One useful but often forgotten feature of Outlook’s Contacts is the ability to map the contact’s address using MapPoint on CD or through a web site if MapPoint is not installed.

Outlook originally used maps on the Expedia website and Microsoft recently redirected the URL to mappoint.com. However, Outlook 2000 does not redirect properly and users are unable to use the external mapping service. If you use Outlook 2000 and don’t have MapPoint installed, you can edit the registry to enable another web-based mapping service.

Read full guide on how to do this at Poremsky.com: Customize Outlook’s Display Map of Address link

People who have already installed the October 2003 Cumulative Patch for Internet Explorer installed do not need to install this patch!

After you apply the cumulative security patch for Internet Explorer that is included in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-032, you may receive the following error message when you try to visit Web pages that are opened by JavaScript functions in frames or in windows:

HTTP 404 – File not found

This problem occurs because the cumulative security patch for Internet Explorer that is included in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-032 changes the base URLs of JavaScript functions to the direct scripting sites. If the JavaScript functions use relative URLs to open Web pages, this change will cause the URLs of the Web pages to be incorrect and you will receive the error message.

Download: Internet Explorer 6 SP1 Update: Error Message When You Try to Visit Web Pages That Are Opened by JavaScript Functions in Frames (English)
Download: Internet Explorer 6 SP1 Update: Error Message When You Try to Visit Web Pages That Are Opened by JavaScript Functions in Frames (different language)

Today at the HR Technology Conference & Exposition at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Microsoft Corp. introduced the Microsoft® Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting software, designed to empower human resources (HR) departments to increase enterprise productivity. The Accelerator for Recruiting was created in response to feedback from customers who want to use Office System technologies, such as the Outlook® messaging and collaboration client and Word, to achieve highly efficient recruiting.

“Office Solution Accelerators help our partners readily build great solutions that give enterprises more value out of the software they already own by solving real-world business problems,” said Peter Rinearson, corporate vice president of the Information Worker Business Unit at Microsoft. “Our customers tell us that up to 50 percent of the time they dedicate to recruiting is spent on administrative duties such as scheduling. With the Accelerator for Recruiting, these tasks can be automated to maximize productivity. For example, a recruiter can schedule a whole set of interviews with just a few mouse clicks.”

Read full article: Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting Launched Today At the HR Technology Conference & Exposition

Microsoft has won a patent for an instant messaging feature that notifies users when the person they are communicating with is typing a message.

The patent encompasses a feature that’s not only on Microsoft’s IM products but also on those of its rivals America Online and Yahoo. The patent was granted on Tuesday.

Patent No. 6,631,412 could serve as a weapon in Microsoft’s battle for IM market share. Microsoft is investing heavily in IM as a springboard for selling communication software to businesses. Later this year, Microsoft plans to launch Live Communications Server, a software product that will initially offer IM for the enterprise and then expand into Internet voice calling and video services.

The software giant currently offers MSN Messenger as a free download off the Web, as well as Windows Messenger, the IM client for its XP operating system. Both services have amassed millions of users.

Having a patent can be a powerful tool, but only if it can be proven in a court that its owner has bulletproof claims to the invention, according to legal experts. Companies that challenge a patent have to prove the patent owner was not the first one on record for the invention.

Read full article: Microsoft pockets an IM patent

The Microsoft Office Project 2003 Workgroup Message Handler is a collaboration tool used by earlier versions of Project that works with the Workgroup Mail functionality. It provides a project manager the ability to communicate with the resources assigned to tasks by using e-mail. Workgroup Mail functionality has been removed as a collaboration option from Microsoft Office Project Standard 2003 and Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003 and is no longer a supported collaboration method. The recommended method for collaboration is to use Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003.

Note Workgroup Mail is an unsupported feature of Microsoft Office Project 2003 and is not planned for future versions of Project.

If you have used Workgroup Mail in earlier versions of Project and were planning on using it in Project 2003, it can be re-enabled as an interim solution while you plan your move to an alternate method of collaboration for future versions of Project. It is important to note that Microsoft plans to discontinue Workgroup Mail in all future versions of Project, and prior versions of Workgroup Mail will not be supported. In addition, no technical support will be available for Workgroup Mail if any issues are encountered after re-enabling it for use with Project.

Download: Microsoft Office Project 2003 Workgroup Message Handler

InfoPath 2003 HL7 CDA Demo is based on a doctor visit scenario where the patient is received, examined, a diagnosis is made and a medication prescribed. The demo is comporised of two InfoPath 2003 solutions, the Physician’s Progress Note and the Pharmacy Order Forms. These electronic forms are based on the Health Level 7 (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard and show how medical data can be retrieved, stored and transmitted electronically to streamline the paperwork normally associated with this encounter, reduce errors and imporove the quality of healthcare.

Download: HL7 CDA Demo
Download: HL7 CDA Demo documentation

Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. today announced a joint development project that leverages Amazon Web Services (http://www.amazon.com/webservices/) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) capabilities of Microsoft® Office System programs to provide users with access to Amazon.com products and data while working in Microsoft productivity applications. The solution, called Amazon.com Research Services for Microsoft Office System, will be available for download in the Office Marketplace (http://www.office.microsoft.com/marketplace/) at no additional charge later this fall.

By integrating Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com Research Services for Microsoft Office System will provide Microsoft Office System users with convenient and seamless access to Amazon.com from within Microsoft productivity applications via the Research Task Pane. Users will be able to access Amazon.com information and make purchases without launching a browser or leaving their document, e-mail message or presentation. For example, a customer reading a bibliography in a Word document could easily click on a book title and purchase it from within the Research Task Pane without having to leave the Word document. Alternatively, a user will be able to add a footnote, bibliography entry and even cover art for books without needing to manually enter the information into a document.

The Research Task Pane, a feature in the Microsoft Office 2003 Edition desktop applications (Word, Excel, the Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, the PowerPoint® presentation graphics program and Access) and in Microsoft Office System products OneNote (TM) note-taking program, Publisher and Visio® drawing and diagramming software, uses industry-standard XML to enable users to retrieve and navigate relevant internal or external Web-based information, all from within Office programs.

Read full article: Microsoft Office System Connects Desktop Programs With Amazon.com

The Microsoft Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit brings the power of XML Web services to Microsoft Office 2003 applications. It has been updated to support Office SOAP 3.0, and features improved handling of complex data types.

Download: Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit

The US must model its anti-spam laws upon those in Europe if it is to effectively crack down on unsolicited email, the All Party Internet Group (APIG) has warned.
The parliamentary anti-spam group is sending a group of its members to Washington to persuade the US congress that unless there are similar global laws to outlaw spam, the problem could get worse.

APIG believes that the EU solution offers better protection than many of the bills currently in front of congress.

“We are not saying we have the right solution but it’s in everyone’s interest to find a solution,” said APIG treasurer, Brian White MP.

The group is concerned that the US might adopt an opt-out measure. This would be at odds with the EU directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, which will introduce the opt-in principle to EU member states.

“The US should adopt the opt-in line we have here in the EU, and this is the single most important measure in the report,” said Richard Allen MP, APIG’s joint-vice chairman.

He warned that if the US, which is currently considering a number of anti-spam bills, adopts one at odds with the EU, it could “potentially make matters worse, which is why we are going to Washington to beat the drum”.

Brian White feared differing laws would be leapt upon by spammers, who would use dissension to wriggle off the hook. “We want to make legislation complementary so spammers can’t play countries off against each other.”

Also in its report on spam, APIG warned that the UK Information Commission, which has to police the EU anti-spam laws, is under-resourced. If policing spam is to be effective, it advised, government will have to give the commission stronger powers to deal with spammers.

And the group criticised the Department of Trade and Industry for a loophole in the planned enforcing of the directive, which does not penalise spammers sending their junk mail to businesses.

The DTI has made “a very serious mistake in not prohibiting unsolicited business-to-business email”, said APIG, calling on the department to reverse this decision.

View: US needs Euro-style spam laws, says APIG on VNUNET

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