Channel Insider Staff

As much as I’d love to be able to tell you to have your customers dump their copies of Outlook and Outlook Express for Thunderbird, I can’t do that … yet. But if you’re willing to work at it, you can make Thunderbird, Mozilla’s open-source e-mail client, a lot more useful even while you’re waiting […]

Let the (reopened) Longhorn date pools begin! Will Microsoft really ship a major new version—something that’s more than just a service pack upgrade—of the Windows desktop next year? Microsoft watchers have been guesstimating since well before the first Longhorn Professional Developer Conference (October 2003) when Microsoft’s XP successor would ship. Starting in earnest last August, […]

Today, April 12, is the day. Like it or lump it, Microsoft is pushing Service Pack 2 to your XP machines even as you’re reading this. If your customers have Automatic Update turned on, ready or not, here it comes. Now for many of you, this is going to be just another day. You’ll probably […]

Red Hat on Thursday announced record revenue and profits for its fourth quarter and its 2005 fiscal year, which ended Feb. 28. The Raleigh, N.C., company’s total revenue for fiscal year 2005 jumped to $196.5 million, an increase of 58 percent from 2004. For the fourth quarter of 2005, the revenue was $57.5 million. This […]

Top Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley revealed Wednesday that Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 has finally been released to manufacturing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that now you’ll get to start installing Server 2003 SP1. I’ve been looking forward to this patch for a long time. Yes, Server 2003 was a […]

When Wal-Mart decreed that its top suppliers would have to install Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in pallet and case-sized loads, a lot of potential RFID users celebrated. It meant Wal-Mart and its cronies would be doing a lot of the work to get RFID working. Fast forward a couple of years and Wal-Mart’s cronies […]

For a long time now, if your customer wanted a small business suite, the only real choice was which of the various Microsoft Small Business Servers to buy. If your customer didn’t want to pay Microsoft’s price or be locked into a Microsoft solution, well, too bad. For most practical purposes, Microsoft was the only […]

Jack Messman, CEO of Novell, is cautious about forecasting the future of the Open Enterprise Server, which combines NetWare services on top of either the Netware or SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition kernel. “We believe in Linux,” said Messman. “We’re migrating all 6,000 of our desktops from Windows to Linux. But with an enterprise operating system […]

Microsoft execs have been reticent to talk about changes that Microsoft is making to Windows’ core “Fundamentals” pillar with Longhorn. But on Tuesday, a handful of Microsoft’s top Windows Longhorn networking officials opened up a bit. Led by Jawad Khaki, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s networking and devices technologies division, the Microsoft Windows execs participated […]

During the ’90s, the phrase “real-time business” was the shibboleth of a particular brand of corporate executive: brash, often arrogant, fiercely ambitious and pretending to be iconoclastic as a way to set himself apart, while actually conforming to the trendiest academic fads. A decade later, the very executives who conceived and implemented the “real-time business” […]

Encouraged by the market reception of its Windows Small Business Server product, Microsoft Corp. is looking for an encore with a similar bundle targeted at midsize businesses. The new Windows Server SKU—called, at least for now, Windows Midmarket Server, or MMS—is not soup yet. But Microsoft executives have a good idea about how they plan […]

I was expecting the jump to IEEE standard-based 100-Mbps Wi-Fi, 802.11n, to take years. I was wrong. Now, it appears that on Thursday, the TGn Sync crew of Atheros, Intel, Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, et. al. has won out over the WWiSE gang of Airgo Networks, Broadcom, Conexant, Motorola, Nokia and Texas Instruments. The 802.11n committee […]