Channel Insider Staff

You’ve probably heard of Vonage and Skype, which offer decent Internet-based calling for individuals. But you should get familiar with Asterisk. This business-oriented VOIP (voice-over-IP) server uses a Web interface to put you in control of your phone system’s features and capabilities. And as a bonus, this system gives everyone in your office an easy […]

Hitachi Consulting is moving its SAP practice toward a vertical operation to leverage SAP AG’s go to market strategy launched in January, the company revealed. Under a redesigned go to market strategy in the SME, SAP is relying on its partners to both extend its reach into the segmented market place and make its All-in-One […]

Microsoft said this week that it will make its Virtual PC software free — not just the older Virtual PC 2004 version, but its upcoming software for Vista, too. Users can download the Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 software from the Microsoft web site. The software allows users to run multiple instances of operating […]

At long lasat, Microsoft has started to turn the crank on Live marketing. As noted last week, Microsoft recently rolled out an “Inside Live” promotional site. But there are a bunch of other Live promotional sites out there, too. Microsoft blogger Dare Obasanjo highlights a few of them, including the Discover Live Spaces, Wire.Live.com and […]

BOSTON—Microsoft partners won’t see much, if any, new revenues from Microsoft’s growing Live family of services in the next year. But throughout the coming decade, the Live tide will transform the kinds of products and services that Microsoft and its partners will be selling, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer highlighted during his July […]

Office 2007 is running late. Microsoft officials acknowledged on June 29 that the company will not meet the October 2006 business-availability target to which it committed in March of this year. At that time, Microsoft officials said to expect retail availability of Office 2007 to be some time in January 2007, so as to coincide […]

Microsoft is laying off 214 U.S. salespeople, a day after it announced some executive shuffling across various product groups, officials confirmed on June 29. While this isn’t the first time Microsoft has cut employees, the move is somewhat uncharacteristic for the 70,000-employee company that has been adding staff by the thousands each year. In 2004, […]

Users don’t buy operating systems for operating systems’ sake; they buy them for the applications that run on them. Given that truism, it’s not too early to wonder about the whereabouts of Windows-Vista-optimized apps. Microsoft will have showcase applications ready in time for the Vista launch, which is still set for January 2007, company officials […]

BOSTON (Reuters) – CA Inc. removed its top sales executive from his post Monday in what it said was part of a restructuring, a week after the business software maker said it found irregularities in how it accounted for sales commissions. Executive Vice President Gregory Corgan had been chief of CA’s worldwide sales since 2004. […]

Nature enthusiasts no longer have to make a major hike to take advantage of the vast array of camping, fishing, rock-climbing and canoeing supplies housed within the walls of outdoor specialty equipment retailer Campmor. Since discovering—and then tapping—the possibilities of a well-designed e-commerce site, the Paramus, N.J., retailer has expanded its possible market to the […]

Cut-rate PC/hardware Windows XP Starter Edition bundles aren’t Microsoft’s only solution for bringing computing to the masses. Microsoft unveiled a new financing program designed to make PCs more affordable to emerging-market customers on May 22, the day before the kick-off of its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle. The new pay-as-you-go program and […]

Move over, Googleplex. Here comes Microsoft CodePlex. CodePlex is not the name for a new wing of the ever-expanding Microsoft campus headquarters. Instead, it is Microsoft’s newest code-repository site, aimed especially at shared- and open-source programmers. On May 15, Microsoft went live with the beta version of its CodePlex site. The site, which is coded […]