Carol Sliwa

IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and other vendors that have been pounding the Web services drum for more than two years claim that more and more of their customers are building Web services. But the spotty levels of commitment by corporate users was plainly evident based on recent comments by 15 IT professionals at Gartner Inc.'s Application Integration and Web Services Summit.

Eric Rudder, senior vice president of servers and tools at Microsoft Corp., declined to nail down a time frame for Longhorn, the next major Windows release this week. But he was more forthcoming about some of the new technologies the company demonstrated at its Professional Developers Conference here.

Eric Rudder, senior vice-president of servers and tools at Microsoft Corp., declined to nail down a time frame for Longhorn, the next major Windows release.

Microsoft Corp. disclosed last week that the next version of its operations management software will introduce a set of packages to monitor Web services.

Corporate users who may have been getting anxious about the impending end date for Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 support will be getting a reprieve.

A New York-based online jewellery retailer blasted an e-mail to customers with the subject line

Microsoft Corp.'s effort to become a bigger player in the systems management market will extend to Web services as early as next year, but more likely around 2006 with the next Windows server release, company executives disclosed.

Microsoft Corp. last week announced an update to its free ASP.Net development tool for building Web applications that use its latest Active Server Pages technology.