SAP Mulling Future of Hosting Business

As it prepares to launch its long-awaited Business ByDesign on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) product, SAP is mulling over the future of its hosting division. Options under consideration include a sale, partnership or a move to integrate the unit's services staff back into the parent corporation.
The company's main competencies lie in software services and support, not data-center management, SAP spokesman Christoph Liedtke said Tuesday.
Liedtke stressed that SAP has not yet made any decision regarding the hosting business.
Meanwhile, SAP is getting ready to launch Business ByDesign on a broader basis.
The company previously scaled back roll-out plans for the service, choosing instead to initially focus on six markets -- China, France, Germany, India, the U.K. and the U.S. -- while it ensures it can turn enough of a profit on the offering.
The company has said it will initially host Business ByDesign on its own and bring in partners later. Nothing has changed in that regard, Liedtke said.
SAP has named a number of initial pilot customers for the software. "You'll start to see customers coming live on it in greater numbers next year... in the first trimester time frame," said SAP executive board member Bill McDermott in an interview Tuesday.
SAP is also moving to build out the Business ByDesign ecosystem. It recently announced a series of partner-provided enhancements to Business ByDesign, centering on payroll, payment reference data, business-to-business collaboration and sales and use tax processing.

Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/152956/.html?tk=rss_news

Microsoft Unveils Google Docs Killer: Office 14

Microsoft has been hinting for some time at plans to not just rival but outdo Google Docs, and today we finally got a glimpse of what the company has in mind. Surprise: They're turning to an old dog that's going to learn some impressive-looking new tricks-Microsoft Office.
In demos at the very end of a long Professional Developers Conference keynote that also marked the public debut of Windows 7, a Microsoft Office team member showed how web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that will be bundled with the next release of Office will allow people to seamlessly collaborate on documents that can reside online or on PCs. (Microsoft later posted a news release about its plans to create "lightweight" versions of Office apps for the Web.)
In one of the demos, the keynote audience saw two people modifying a One Note document-one from within a desktop version of OneNote and another working on the browser-based version of the note-taking application. And in another, we watched a full-featured spreadsheet being modified in similar fashion, in close to real time (there was a slight lag).
The Webification of Office promises functionality that goes beyond what Microsoft already offers as Google alternatives in its existing Windows Live program-in fact, Microsoft says it will deliver the Office apps via Office Live. The beauty of this approach (and why it might actually succeed in winning converts from Google Docs) is that Microsoft starts the Web competition with a big advantage in terms of formats: Office documents remain the lingua franca of business communication.
The demos suggest that the problem of offline access would go away, since documents would be automatically synced (via Live Mesh technology). What remains to be seen is what you'd need to do to avail yourself of Web-desktop synchronicity-would you have to sign up for some kind of Microsoft collaboration service, or pay for storage space that Google now gives away for free?
We don't yet know when Microsoft plans to release the next version of Office (although if past history is any indication, it shouldn't be too long after Windows 7, which is still officially slated to debut in early 2010). But Microsoft has said it will be working on extending anytime-anywhere functionality to mobile devices (presumably Windows Mobile devices). In his remarks during both today's and yesterday's keynotes, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said over and over again that Microsoft intends to bring customers the benefits of the desktop, the Web, and mobility in the years to come.


Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/152952/Office_14_Gets_Webby.html?tk=rss_news

Microsoft Vows Windows 7 Will Fix Vista Mistakes

Microsoft on Tuesday for the first time publicly demonstrated Windows 7, the next major release of its OS for PCs that Microsoft insists will reflect lessons learned from the widely panned Windows Vista.
Microsoft also laid out a road map for the release of Windows 7 and handed out a pre-beta version to developers at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), where it also demonstrated new features in a keynote address Tuesday.
The first public beta of the OS will be available early next year, and subsequent test releases and release candidates will follow based on that feedback, said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live at Microsoft.
Windows 7 is still targeted for release three years after Vista, he added. This would put its business release in late 2009 and general availability at the end of January 2010 if the OS remains on schedule.
In his keynote Tuesday, Sinofsky said Microsoft is learning its lessons from Vista, which was widely criticized by users and the press, and spoofed famously in humorous television advertisements by competitor Apple.
Sinofsky acknowledged that some of the criticism was deserved, particularly around Microsoft's lack of preparing its hardware, software and peripheral partners for Vista's release, even though it was more than five years in the making.
Early Vista users experienced incompatibility with applications and found that devices and peripherals would not work with the OS because drivers weren't available upon the release of the OS.
Microsoft won't repeat this mistake with Vista, Sinofsky said, and because the OS kernel -- or its underlying code base -- is the same as the one in Vista and Windows Server 2008, all of the devices and applications that work with those OSes should also run on Windows 7.
"All of this device and compatibility work will pay off in Windows 7," he said.
Microsoft also will tweak the User Account Control feature (UAC), which was new in Vista, so it will be less of an inconvenience and work more efficiently for users, Sinofsky said.
UAC prevents users without administrative privileges from making unauthorized changes to a PC. But because of how it was set up in Vista, it can prevent even authorized users on the network from being able to access applications and features they should normally have access to.
UAC did this through pop-up windows, which also were spoofed by Apple in television ads because Vista users reported they appeared so frequently, even when users were performing authorized tasks.
Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft "went a little too far with UAC," but as a result the Windows client OS is now more secure. In Windows 7, Microsoft will focus on the security aspects of UAC but will ensure it is not an invasive feature for users, he said.
During Tuesday's keynote, Microsoft showed off some new features in Windows 7, including a streamlined view of all the files and folders contained not only on a user's PC, but also any other PCs on networks that the users are allowed access to.
This feature is called Libraries, and it will improve desktop search in Windows 7 by allowing users to search more comprehensively across PC folders than ever before, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft also changed its Gadgets feature, another new Vista feature. Gadgets are mini-applications that give users quick access to information, such as stock prices or weather, with icons that users in Windows 7 will be able to move around the desktop. In Vista, gadget icons were confined to a task bar.
Perhaps the sexiest new Windows 7 feature demonstrated Tuesday was its touchscreen interface, which lets people use their fingertips and small hand gestures to control applications on their PCs.
Microsoft demonstrated how touchscreen controls can replace the mouse for things like opening the taskbar and choosing a Windows Explorer window. If a user opens a folder with photos in it in Windows Folder, they can scroll through those photos using their fingers, and drag a photo into a Windows Paint application window and draw directly on the photo.

Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/152942/.html?tk=rss_news