News from Microsoft and other tech companies this week was
largely eclipsed by Apple, whose iPad tablet dominated headlines during its
first days in general release. Nonetheless, a number of rumors surfaced related
to several large Microsoft projects, including a Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and
“Project Pink,” the company’s long-speculated branded smartphone initiative.
After Microsoft sent out invitations to a San Francisco
event April 12, with the title “It’s Time to Share,” various online pundits
speculated that the company was on the verge of finally revealing Project Pink;
the
general expectation is that Microsoft will debut two smartphones, dubbed
“Turtle” and “Pure” and supposedly aimed at a younger, social-networking-happy
demographic. According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar
with the matter,” the phones’ hardware has been designed by Sharp.
If the rumors prove true, the debut of Pink would be a
logical progression on months of rumors about an imminent unveiling,
highlighted by a March report from Reuters that Verizon and Microsoft planned
on teaming up to release social-networking-centric devices in either late
spring or early summer. Also in March, Gizmodo
posted spy images of what was purported to be the “Pure” phone.
While Project Pink is decidedly consumer-oriented, Microsoft
made some key enterprise announcements this week; on April 7, Microsoft
announced that it would offer a beta of its Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1
(SP1) for North American download in June, incorporating a number of
changes to the user interface, integrated archiving and other areas.
“SP1 will include fixes and tweaks in areas you’ve helped us
identify, including a roll-up of the roll-ups we’ve released to date,” team
member Michael Atalla wrote in an
April 7 posting on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog. “I also wanted to flag
some of the feature enhancements we’re excited to bring you with Sp1, including
archiving and discovery enhancements, [OWA] Outlook Web App … improvements,
mobile user and management improvements, and some highly sought-after
additional UI for management tasks.”
The SP1 supposedly enhances Exchange Server’s archiving
functionality, allowing administrators to “provision a user’s Personal Archive
to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox,” according to
Atalla. In effect, this allows an IT administrator to implement tiered storage
for certain types of e-mail, while importing historical e-mail data from .pst
files directly into Exchange.
A new feature in the SP1 will also create Retention Policy
Tags via the Exchange Management Console, automating e-mail archiving and
deletion. New UI enhancements to the Exchange Management Console and Exchange
Control Panel include the ability to configure Transport Rules and Journal
Rules in ECP, in addition to provisioning and configuring the Personal Archive.
Other SP1 changes include tweaks to OWA. “With new work to
prefetch message content, the OWA reading experience becomes faster,” Atalla
wrote. “With delete, mark as read and categorize operations running
asynchronously, these actions feel instantaneous to the user.” He added: “We’ve
also made sure that certain long-running operations, such as attaching a very
large file, will not block the rest of the OWA experience, protecting the user
from irritating Web UI hang-ups. You’ll see a number of other UI improvements
as well to declutter a bit.”
In the “Service Pack” category, rumors
circulated this week of a Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in the works, with a
purported build leaking onto a variety of Torrent Websites. That build had a
compile date of March 27, along with the string “build
6.1.7601.16537.amd64fre.win7.100327-0053.” Screenshots quickly leaked onto
sites such as GeekSmack,
which described the download and installation process as “faster than the
install process for service packs on Vista.”
Microsoft’s adjustments to its existing platforms extended
to a newly released version of its Microsoft Dynamics CRM customized for
non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGO), with additional tools
such as donation and pledge management, basic membership management, basic
volunteer tracking, support for online payment solutions and campaign
management.
“Nonprofits and NGOs are always challenged with doing more
with less,” Sarah Barnhart, senior program manager for community affairs at
Microsoft, wrote in an April 7 statement. “We see technology as being a key
enabler of helping nonprofits to reduce administration and focus their
resources on where they can have the biggest impact. Microsoft Dynamics CRM for
nonprofits and NGOs includes customized features that simplify administration
and management for organizations of every size.” This customized version of
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is apparently available for $9.99 per seat per month.
Expect Microsoft’s news next week to be dominated by Project
Pink, if this week’s rumors pan out April 12.
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