RIM loses another senior executive
Struggling BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd. is losing another senior executive as its chief legal officer is retiring from the company after 12 years.
RIM said Monday that Karima Bawa had been in discussions about her retirement for some time and plans to stay on to help with the transition once a replacement has been hired. Read more...
Office Live Small Business users fret over Office 365 transition
Many companies that rely on OLSB (Office Live Small Business) for their email and website hosting are complaining that a required transition to Office 365 or to a third-party hosting provider is too complicated for them to carry out and that Microsoft could be doing more to help them out as OLSB's closure date fast approaches.
A cloud-hosted service, OLSB, will close on April 30, and customers have the option to move to Office 365 or to another hosting provider, but discussion forums and blogs are lit up with posts and comments from stressed-out users who are having a hard time carrying out the transition.
For these customers, the issue is critical because it involves their business' website and email communications.
Asked for comment, a Microsoft spokeswoman pointed out that the company announced that Office 365 would replace OLSB in October 2010, and that it is actively communicating with OLSB users via email and official discussion forums and websites, like this official "transition center." Read more...
Shock: Windows 8 optimized for desktop tablets
Microsoft demonstrated the next version of Windows this week, and the operating system has an interface almost nobody expected or predicted.
The default interface for Windows 8 will look almost nothing like Windows 7, but will look and feel a heck of a lot like Microsoft's cell-phone operating system, Windows Phone 7.
What's going on here?
Way back in February 2007, I told you about the coming era of touch-screen desktop computing -- "an iPhone the size of a big-screen TV." I asked: "Will the desktop version of this third-generation UI come from Apple, or Microsoft?" Read more...
San Francisco Migrates to Hosted Exchange
The city and county of San Francisco have started a transition to using Microsoft's hosted e-mail service, choosing the software giant's service over Google and Lotus Notes.
Over the next year San Francisco will transition 23,000 users to the system and has had 300 pilot employees using the hosted service for the past five months.
San Francisco will pay Microsoft US$1.2 million a year or $6.50 per month per user, said Jon Walton, CIO for the City and County of San Francisco. "It's a significant cost savings to the city and was one of the key ways the department of technology was able to achieve the 20 percent budget reduction for this year which was a directive from the mayor," he said. Read more...