Pedro Hernandez

Microsoft may have officially pulled the plug on Windows XP, but organizations that want to keep enduring the operating system on life support have to pay up. In the case of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), it is taxpayers who are footing the bill. The agency is paying Microsoft less than $500,000 to support […]

Microsoft today delivered on an important part of its universal Windows app strategy. The company announced that beginning April 14, developers can update their own phones to run Windows Phone 8.1, allowing them to leverage several of the new features that the company officially unveiled earlier this month at the Build conference in San Francisco. […]

Microsoft is serious about shrinking Windows 8.1 down to size, enough so that the operating system takes up only a few gigabytes of storage on tablets. The company highlighted a “new deployment option” named Windows Image Boot (WIMBoot) in a blog post from Michael Niehaus, senior product marketing manager for Microsoft’s Windows Commercial division. Unlike […]

Microsoft has a silver lining to share during the Heartbleed crisis, at least for users of its Azure cloud services. Addressing concerns about the OpenSSL flaw and its potential effects on Microsoft’s expansive cloud services slate, the software giant revealed that Azure was safe from Heartbleed, Andrew Cushman, senior director of the Security Incident Response […]

Microsoft announced on April 10 that its enterprise cloud services, particularly Azure, Office 365, Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune, meet the European Union (EU) privacy standards set forth by the Article 29 Working Party. The group comprises data protection authorities from the EU’s 28 member states and the European Commission. The approval was issued via […]

DevOps is hot, and now one company is bringing the collaborative, agile development strategy to organizations with SQL database server deployments. DBmaestro, a DevOps software specialist, has launched a version of its TeamWork product for Microsoft SQL Server, enabling the company to address 65 percent of the database market. DBmaestro TeamWork is already available for […]

Add cars to Microsoft’s vision of bringing Windows into the burgeoning market for the Internet of things. As the term suggests, the Internet of things (IoT) describes a network of devices and sensors, plus the IT services required to support them. Gartner predicts that by 2020, the IoT will encompass 26 billion devices, each pumping […]

For Microsoft, this week not only marks a big break from its past but also a return to it, of sorts. On April 8, the software giant finally pulled the plug on one of its most successful and long-lived products, Windows XP, while simultaneously releasing the Windows 8.1 Update to the general public. The new […]

iPad owners have propelled Microsoft to the top of the charts on the rival Apple App Store. A week after the March 27 launch of Office for iPad, the company announced that the new apps had amassed millions of downloads. On April 3, the company tweeted, “More than 12 million downloads of Word, Excel, PPT […]

Today, for the first time, Windows XP users are in uncharted territory. As the company has repeatedly warned during the past year, it has officially ended support for the 12-year-old operating system. “Windows XP support has ended,” reads an attention-grabbing headline on a Microsoft Website devoted to Windows XP’s support deadline. “As of April 8, […]