Ed Scannell

During the opening keynote at Microsoft Corp.'s Tech Ed developer conference in New Orleans, the company will announce that the first fully .Net-enabled server, Commerce Server 2002, has been released to manufacturing, according to company officials.

IBM Corp. on Tuesday announced a suite of middleware products aimed at helping the world's largest banks speed up their transition to SwiftNet as well as to make trusted electronic payments more secure.

Houston-based start-up Advanced Reality has come out of the blocks with software that adds real-time collaboration capabilities to existing copies of Microsoft Excel.

Ximian released its Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange, along with its Red Carpet Corporate Connect, a Web-based service that providers users with centralized software maintenance and version management of Linux workgroups.

With the final vote on approving the landmark Compaq Computer Corp.-Hewlett-Packard Co. merger coming on March 19, one of the most critical elements to the overall success of the deal figures to be smooth integration of the companies' respective global services organizations.

Still conducting research to determine market interest, IBM Research is showing off a prototype 9-ounce portable-computing device that can be quickly transformed into a handheld, desktop, or laptop system.

In an attempt to ensure consistency in the development of Web services, IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., and BEA Systems Inc. on Thursday will announce a software group the purpose of which will be to promote existing and future standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Organization for the Advancement Of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

IBM Corp. and Verisign Inc. on Tuesday unveiled an ambitious deal that will see development of a managed entitlement service based on the Tivoli Policy Director, as well as a tight working relationship between VeriSign and IBM's Global Services and hardware groups.