Managed Services & Outsourcing

Microsoft Corp. has yet to release a feature-complete beta version of its upcoming Visual Studio 2005 development tools. But at this week's VSLive conference in Orlando, it announced a refresh of the existing beta release and disclosed more details about the product.

Oracle Corp. is expanding the management functionality offered to users of its business applications and is working with members of the independent Oracle Applications Users Group to improve its technical support and software development processes.

A Sun Microsystems Inc. official at the BorCon conference in San Jose, California on Tuesday touted the Java Community Process (JCP) for amending the Java programming language, but did not have any revelations pertaining to industry calls for making Java available under an open source format.

Microsoft Corp. recently said it will sacrifice some key advances it had planned for Longhorn so it can deliver the successor to Windows XP in 2006.

Tales from the depths of IT departments.

The tendency to seize the first solution we think of, even for the most inconsequential of problems, is a dangerous one.

One thing is for sure

The focus of one of our main news stories this week is something that has made its unwelcome presence felt quite strongly on corporate networks in the last half year or so: spyware.