Stuart J. Johnston

A small Seattle firm has come out with a unique tool to record and transfer handwritten notes taken in the field into Microsoft’s OneNote annotation software for Office: pen and paper. Handwriting-to-PC solutions aren’t especially uncommon. What’s unusual about Adapx’s solution — called Capturx for Microsoft Office OneNote — is that its ink pen contains […]

UPDATED: Microsoft earlier this year offered to bestow high-end versions of its Windows and Office software on home users, under the condition that they let the software giant monitor their usage. While the prospect sparked privacy concerns among a few, the dilemma of whether to participate in the trade-off may now be moot: On Tuesday, […]

All of those users who have been waiting to kick the tires on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), it’s time to start your engines – well … almost. While it’s not quite ready for prime time yet, the general public will be able to get its hands on the latest test copy in the […]

Microsoft this week shipped release candidates, or RCs, for both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008. Additionally, the company disclosed that it will release SP1 for Office 2007 next Tuesday. “Microsoft made the Windows Vista SP1 RC available to Microsoft Connect [today], and tomorrow the RC will be made available to […]

‘Tis the season to be litigious and for Microsoft, Santa is apparently coming down the chimney dressed in judge’s robes this year. Like a gift that keeps on giving, the latest legal hassle for the company began on Thursday, when z4 Technologies, whose giant damage award against Microsoft for patent infringement was just upheld on […]

It turns out that the next version of Microsoft’s Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform multimedia plug-in technology is more extensive – and thus more important—than company officials initially thought. That’s why the company decided that the next release, due out next year, will be numbered version 2.0 instead of 1.1. “We’ve been referring to this release as […]

IBM on Wednesday announced a significant update to one management tool, and talked up another that it recently shipped. Both products are aimed at simplifying management of the company’s System z mainframes. The announcement came at the 2007 Governance and Risk Management Summit in Sanya, China. The new and updated products are part of IBM’s […]

If you’re waiting for the first service pack before deploying Windows Vista, don’t expect it to show improved performance – especially compared to its predecessor, Windows XP. That’s according to Devil Mountain Software, a small, four-year-old developer in south Florida. Last week, the firm announced the results of recent tests it performed on near final […]

What a difference a few days can make. Last week, analysis firm Forrester Research released a report suggesting deployments of Vista inside enterprises were about to take off after a year in the doldrums. However, another analysis firm, King Research, on Monday released the results of its own survey, which shows 90 percent of IT […]

As promised earlier this month, Microsoft announced this week it is shipping the final code of Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008), the latest release of its flagship integrated development environment. The company said in early November that it was on target to have VS2008 ready for shipment this month, even though the product’s formal launch won’t […]

In a surprise move, Microsoft has postponed its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2008 from next spring to next fall, leaving many industry observers with a simple question: Why? The conference was pushed back due to “industry feedback,” a company spokesperson told InternetNews.com. Adding that Microsoft had no further comment, the spokesperson referred to the […]

Microsoft released the near final version of the first service pack for Windows Vista this week, and a new report predicts that the system’s corporate heyday is just around the corner. The report by analysis firm Forrester Research predicts that while deployments of Vista in enterprises to date have been slow, that dam is about […]