Microsoft Reverses Course, Opens Office to ODF
by Alex Woodie

Bowing to pressure from European customers and regulators intent on utilizing Open Document Format (ODF), Microsoft last week announced it will include native support for ODF within Office, after all. The change comes as a departure from Microsoft's previous strategy, which required people to use separate translation tools if they wanted to open or save an ODF document. In addition to ODF, next year's Office 2007 update will support the XPS and PDF formats, as well. READ MORE >

Intel and Itanium Partners Gear Up for Quad-Core Tukwilas
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a bit slow news-wise around the Memorial Day holiday, and that was as good a reason as any for some of the key members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance to start talking up the future 'Tukwila' quad-core Itanium processors, which are expected to start shipping to server makers at the end of 2008 and to appear in servers in early 2009. Another good reason to talk up the Itanium is that competitive dual-core and quad-core chips, many of them running the data center workloads that Itanium was designed for, are already on the market, eating up mindshare. READ MORE >

Hyper-V RC1 Released as Microsoft Shares Performance Data
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft last week delivered a second release candidate for Hyper-V, the new hypervisor that will enable Windows Server users to carve their boxes into numerous virtual machines. Hyper-V Release Candidate 1 (RC1) introduces some new features, such as support for Windows 2000 and an easier installation process. But it's Microsoft's experience in using Hyper-V to run some of its Web sites, and the early glimpse it provides into Hyper-V's performance characteristics, that is most interesting. READ MORE >

Paglo Aims to be the Google of IT Management
by Alex Woodie

Paglo Monday started the public beta of its new hosted IT management offering that's designed to help IT professionals do their jobs more efficiently by employing the Web's original breakthrough technology--search--to cross organizational boundaries to solve common IT problems. With a simple Web-based GUI, a blend of commercial open source and SaaS business models, and a successful private beta, Paglo just might live up to its billing as the Google of IT management. READ MORE >