In keeping with tradition, the following are seven articles that were posted here at CMSReport.com and received less attention than I had hoped. Either the reader didn't show up to view the article or there was little discussion on the subject matter. I'll let you be the judge on whether these articles deserved the obscurity they received in 2008.
A recent blog post from Sarah Parez tries to answer some "want-to-know" questions on the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications. With software as a service becoming more popular, Google has quickly become a competitor of Microsoft's Office Suite with its Google Docs. Microsoft is aggressively fighting back by making its Office software available via the Web browser.
Gizmodo published their first impressions of the Windows 7 operating system currently being developed by Microsoft. Microsoft allowed developers and reviewers get a sneak peek of this Vista replacement during this week's Professional Developers Conference. Gizmodo and other tech blogs have indicated Windows 7, although still incomplete, looks to be a better version of Windows than Vista. Improvements in boot-up time, work-flow, performance, and user interface all take center stage with this new version of Windows.
The single reason enterprises with Windows networks prefer Internet Explorer over Firefox and other browsers: Group Policy.
For those of you who might be new to Group Policy, here is a quick background. Let’s first assume you use an Active Directory environment to administer the computers in your corporate network. If that is the case, Group Policy provides a wide set of policy settings to manage IE8 after you have deployed it to your users' computers. These settings are locked down and cannot be changed by users, as they are always written to a secure tree in the registry.
Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?
There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.
XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.
So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.
On Monday, Microsoft announced from their IEBlog that they were reversing their decision for how Internet Explorer 8 would be compatible with Web pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet standards. You may recall that earlier this year Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 in "Standards Mode" would actually be rendering pages in Internet Explorer 7's "Standards Mode". If you really wanted to have IE8 follow the latest standards then you would need to insert a special tag to your pages.
I have a long history of using Windows and Linux systems at my place of work. I'm not into Windows bashing as the operating system and other Microsoft software historically has been a much needed standard for the business world. When my workplace had a choice of either installing a Windows 2003 server or a Linux server to support administrative functions, I chose Windows over Linux. However, as much as I wanted to see Windows Vista succeed in the office, I just don't see a future with Vista. Vista reminds me too much of Windows ME.
The latest review I've read on the KDE desktop is from Ars Technica, A first look at KDE 4.0 release candidate 2. While the author notes that a lot of improvements still need to be made to KDE 4.0, overall it should be an impressive desktop. I'm contemplating that my next laptop will be fully Linux and hoping KDE 4.0 will bring enough Wow to impress others on why I didn't choose to go the Windows or Mac route.
Absolutely disappointing. Everyone is waiting to hear what the new features will be in the next version of Internet Explorer 8 will have...and still no information out in the open. Microsoft, knows it has a trust issue with its customers...yet they have yet to learn that trust is built on good communication. This is what Microsoft's IEBloggers have to say:
eWeek has a slideshow of Microsoft's top 25 open source projects.
With a bid underway to obtain the blessing of the Open Source Initiative for two of its software licenses, Microsoft is working to burnish its open source credentials. Here are the 25 most active projects, as of August 21, on Microsoft's CodePlex open source project hosting Web site, along with the licenses under which the projects have been released.
Let me ask you this, what would likely happen if Microsoft opened up Windows Vista? Do you think open source developers would pitch in to improve Vista or would they gut the code and start building a new Windows operating system from scratch?