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Software companies that provide alternatives to Microsoft Exchange, cautiously welcomed at CeBIT last week the recent publication of application programming interfaces for Microsoft volume server products, but have found gaps already in what has been released.

Zarafa Chief Executive Brian Joseph–having ported, as he put it, “all the Exchange features to the Linux platform with full MAPI (messaging application programming interface) implementation”– said there are significant gaps in the Microsoft documentation released to date. Zarafa makes an e-mail server that is compatible with Outlook

Speaking to ZDNet UK at the CeBIT conference, Joseph said Microsoft’s start is not promising: “This could definitely make life easier for developers, but we have spotted over 200 undocumented exceptions, including one that allows you to create recurring calendar appointments in Exchange. It was in the documentation for Exchange 2000, but they forgot to document it for Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007.”

Zarafa produces the eponymous e-mail server that runs on Linux and is used by enterprises such as car-rental company Sixt, which recently migrated its entire e-mail server infrastructure to Zarafa. Zarafa uses the MAPI open standard to communicate to e-mail clients such as Outlook. While Microsoft Exchange uses MAPI too, it also uses a large number of proprietary APIs that let the Outlook client perform actions such as creating recurring calendar appointments on the Exchange server.

“I am very positive about unconditional publication of APIs,” said Joseph, “but only time will tell if this is justified, given Microsoft’s history. I think hundreds of thousands of developers around the world are very interested in full publication with regular updates, but the devil is in the detail; for policy makers, these gaps in the Exchange documentation should put another light on the value of Microsoft’s announcement.”

Zimbra Vice President John Robb agreed that Microsoft’s announcement is a good move, but again expressed reservations. His company produces the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which also runs on Linux platforms and servers. The Zimbra Collaboration suite runs 11 million mailboxes through the commercial version of its product and many more through the open-source version.

“The MAPI protocol is open anyway, so that doesn’t affect us directly,” Robb said, “but we are concerned that Microsoft has not announced which APIs have patent conditions, nor what those conditions are. We’re anxiously awaiting details.”

Matt Loney of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

It looks like News Corp. won’t be Yahoo’s knight in shining armor, after all.

News Corp. does not plan on fighting Microsoft over Yahoo, Rupert Murdoch told investors at the annual Bear Stearns media conference.

“We’re not going to get into a fight with Microsoft, which has a lot more money than us,” Reuters reported.

Yahoo has snubbed Microsoft’s unsolicited $41.4 billion takeover bid as undervalued. To thwart Microsoft, Yahoo had been talking to News Corp. about possibly combining MySpace.com and Yahoo, according to reports.

Yahoo also has reportedly been talking to Time Warner about combining with its AOL division, but so far, nothing of substance seems to have emerged from that, either.

Microsoft could go hostile with its bid and try to install its own candidates on Yahoo’s board. Yahoo delayed the deadline for Microsoft to offer up its slate in order to buy more time. But it appears that the would-be suitors aren’t interested enough.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

IBM has said it is not getting back into the PC market, despite selling “Microsoft-free” PCs running Linux and OpenOffice in Eastern Europe.

“We’re not getting back into the PC business,” said an IBM spokesman, after the company announced deals with system integrators in two Eastern European countries last week.

It is IBM’s intention to sell the so-called “Open Referent” systems, based on Red Hat Linux and the company’s own Lotus Symphony software, which uses the open-source OpenOffice productivity software, in Eastern Europe.

IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo in 2005 for $1.75 billion, and this is the second indication of overlaps between the companies; Lenovo, having dropped the IBM brand from its ThinkPads, is now moving into servers, licensing the xServer brand and technology from IBM.

IBM will work with VDEL of Austria to make the boxes, which will be distributed by LX Polska of Poland. They will use open-source software instead of any Microsoft components and could cost half as much as the Microsoft-based alternative, according to some reports. IBM said there was a big demand from large businesses and government agencies in Eastern Europe and Russia, including the Russian Ministry of Defense and Aeroflot airline. The RusHotel hotel chain said Open Referent could cut its costs in half.

Part of the driver for the deal seems to be dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s document standards, with governments demanding the OpenDocument Format instead of the series of formats used in Microsoft Office applications. Some claim that the Linux PCs are also more secure than their Windows equivalents.

“We are extremely excited that we finally have an alternative document-management offering to Microsoft, based on open source, that fits our needs,” Aleksandar Spagnut, director of RusHotel, said in a VDEL press release. “We are already starting to implement this and are happy that IBM is again taking the lead in providing a total solution for the small- and medium-sized market, based on open source.”

“Open Referent is a highly competitive alternative to Microsoft offerings for large organizations,” said Oleg Churko, director of the Research Institute for Information Security in Minsk, Belarus. “Taking into account the unmatched security offered by the Linux platform, it will set a new standard for document management.”

Peter Judge of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

The United States is expected to recommend that Microsoft’s Open XML file formats be ratified as an international standard, according to people involved in the process.

Two members of the technical committee tasked with setting the U.S.’s position on a pivotal vote said that the U.S. will retain its “Approve” position in a vote to make Open XML a standard at the International Organization for Standards (ISO).

The chair of the committee, Patrick Durusau, who is also the editor of the rival OpenDocument standard, said that the controversy surrounding Microsoft’s Open XML standards bid is being fueled by an irrational anti-Microsoft sentiment.

“What is puzzling in this day and age of quarterly reports and returns that any corporate governance structure would long tolerate spite as a business strategy. Or that investors would stay with companies that follow such strategies,” wrote Durusau in a blog on Friday (click for PDF).

The Executive Board of the US technical committee, called INCITS, will make the final decision on that recommendation.

Microsoft started the process of trying to make Open XML an international standard at the ISO two years ago. Last fall, open XML failed to pass a ballot of international standards delegates. But a meeting in Geneva earlier this month, called the Ballot Resolution Meeting, sought to resolve technical problems and move the specification closer to standardization.

Delegates from national standards bodies have until March 29 to vote on Open XML. If it gains enough support, it will be certified as a standard.

Doug Mahugh, a Microsoft senior product manager and member of the INCITS committee, said on Friday that the next step for the US delegation is to hold a ballot on the recommendation.

In addition to inciting anti-Open XML campaigns, such as the NOOXML movement, Microsoft’s handling of the process has dismayed many industry observers who say that the company inappropriately chose an accelerated process for very complicated technical specification.

A number of attendees to the Ballot Resolution Meeting at the end of last month complained that many of the technical issues were not thoroughly examined and that the credibility of the ISO standard process has been damaged.

In one example, a delegate from Brazil said the country’s plan to discuss backward compatibility was not addressed during the BRM.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Microsoft may be in a hurry to acquire Yahoo’s advertising revenue, but it won’t rush to merge its computing systems with Yahoo’s after a potential merger, according to a top executive.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, told the Financial Times that the company would take a long, hard look before attempting any integration of technologies.

“Technology companies, if they dive in and just smash things together for smashing-them-together’s sake, it’s reckless, it’s just simply reckless,” Ozzie told the FT in a story published on Sunday.

At last week’s Mix ‘08 conference in Las Vegas, Ozzie talked about Microsoft’s efforts to build a “seamless mesh” computing infrastructure that will be more aware of mobile devices and online applications.

As our own Dan Farber put it last week, reporting from Ozzie’s Mix keynote: “Ultimately, the ‘mesh’ requires an overhaul of the back end to support utility computing on a grand scale. In addition, applications need to be ‘refactored,’ Ozzie said.”

That refactoring may need to extend to a range of open source-based applications within Yahoo that Microsoft will need to tackle before it can fully realize the benefits of any merger.

Ozzie may have made an oblique reference to that challenge in his Mix keynote: “And then there’s Yahoo…I can say it’s already added some interesting twists to what promises to be a really, really exciting year,” he said.

Microsoft may have already begun to help itself in this integration challenge. Last month, the company launched a broad interoperability strategy to better link to open-source software and other non-Microsoft technologies.

News.com’s Stephen Shankland underlined the significance of that move, in light of the Yahoo bid. “The third, and perhaps strongest reason, is that open-source software has become a powerful force in the software industry and customer sites–and even at Yahoo, the Internet company Microsoft is trying to acquire for $44.6 billion in part because of its engineering expertise.”

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

LAS VEGAS–While Internet Explorer 8 demos, Silverlight progress and a Monkey Boy reprise from Steve Ballmer captured much of the attention at Mix 08–it was a database announcement that could be the sleeper announcement of the show.

Campbell

What Microsoft announced was a database-in-the-cloud service where Web developers can store their data. Those attending the Mix show here were able to sign up for a beta test that is set to begin in three or four weeks, with a final version aimed to be launched by the end of the year, according to Dave Campbell, a technical fellow in Microsoft’s SQL Server division.

“We’re taking SQL Server we’re pulling pieces of it apart and we’re putting it back together,” Campbell said in an interview. One of the challenges is taking software designed to run highly reliable servers and storage and turning it into a commodity service.

But, Campbell said, that’s also where the opportunity lies. “In this world, dumb and fast rules.”

“If you give up a tiny bit in terms of the degree of consistency in the architecture, you can get tremendous resiliency and scale, but you want to retain enterprise-class quality around data service,” he explained. Factoring data into classes of data or tiers is one way to improve the class of service using commodity gear, he said.

What Microsoft is doing in this case with its database is also the kind of thing it makes sense to imagine the company doing with a variety of “building block” services.

“SQL Data Services is a building block for Microsoft’s longer term vision of a services fabric for developing and deploying applications,” Campbell said. “Imagine at some point a version of Visual Studio with a services palette in the toolbox and wiring up and composing services.”

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said that it’s important for Microsoft to be a player in this area.

“A lot of computing and storage is going to be moving online,” he said. “For them not to get into this game would be suicidal at some level.”

Campbell downplayed the notion that Microsoft was competing with Amazon.com’s S3 service.

Haff said that there are some differences, since Amazon targets largely unstructured data and Microsoft is aimed more at structured and semi-structured data, but said it’s not like the two don’t overlap.

“They are targeting a somewhat different market, but everyone competes at some level,” he said.

Campbell wouldn’t get into how Microsoft would price the service, but said it some type of usage model that takes into account both the amount of data stored in the cloud as well as the bandwidth used in transferring information.

CNET News.com’s Dan Farber contributed to this report.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

While Google receives lots of attention for its suite of Web applications, and Microsoft waits on the sidelines, Zoho continues to add new components to its Web suite.

The latest addition to the suite, which already includes modules for everything from documents and spreadsheets to CRM and wikis, is Zoho People, a human resource management application.

Zoho People, currently in beta, includes the usual HR functions for administrators and employees, with modules for organization, recruitment, forms and checklists (workflow). In
addition, Zoho Creator has been integrated within Zoho People, allowing users to customize the application.

Zoho People joins Zoho CRM, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects and Zoho DB as part of the Zoho business applications suite.

Zoho is targeting businesses with more than 50 employees for the new product. Pricing is expected to be around $50 per month for administrators and $50 per year for employees, according to Raju Vegesna of Zoho.

Zoho could bump up against more established software-as-a-service HR offerings from well funded companies such as Workday, Taleo, NetSuite, SuccessFactors and others.

But Zoho is likely to focus more on smaller businesses with its comprehensive set of browser-based productivity and business applications and viral marketing approach. In fact, Zoho is most concerned about setting itself apart from Google, which lacks the business applications. Google, as well as Microsoft, will be watching Zoho closely to see if it gains any traction with customers. If so, either one would be a candidate to acquire the Zoho, which is a subsidiary India-based of AdventNet.

See also a video about Zoho People, Zoli Erdos’ post on Zoho People, and Larry Dignan’s take.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech