Carol Sliwa

Microsoft Corp. announced this month its first set of certification credentials for IT administrators and engineers who specialize in security in a Windows environment.

Microsoft Corp. yesterday unveiled a new package of benefits that it plans to start offering in September to customers who purchased its controversial Software Assurance agreement to gain upgrade rights to various products.

It's no secret that Microsoft Corp. will direct a special marketing pitch at Windows NT Server 4.0 users when the company releases its Windows Server 2003 operating system this month, just as it did for Windows Server 2000. And its announcement of the phase-out of support for NT Server 4.0 certainly caused hordes of users to sit up and take notice.

A major standards body recently announced the ratification of a standard that could benefit companies that need to control user access to Web services or secured information over the Internet. The Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) is an XML specification that can be used to describe authorization policies in an open, interoperable way.

Microsoft Corp.'s recently revamped and renamed Datacenter High Availability Program will bring users additional options for support and a quicker path to swap out minor components from their pretested configurations.

Software that can help retailers set initial prices and manage their markdown cycles could see an uptick in adoption this year if the interest expressed at this week's National Retail Federation Conference & Expo in New York in January morphs into action plans.

Tony Scott, chief technology officer of the information systems and services organization at General Motors Corp., spoke with Computerworld about the automaker's plans for Web services technology, the expected benefits from them and the possible risks GM hopes to avoid.

Windows NT Server users who were worried that they might be running an unsupported operating system next year got some welcome news from Microsoft Corp.