Jason Brooks

In one of the most substantial incarnations of its software-plus-services model to date, Microsoft is preparing to throw its hat into an already-crowded ring of hosted Exchange providers. In fact, Microsoft’s Web site lists more than 30 hosted Exchange providers operating in the United States. Perhaps the most significant thing about the company’s Exchange Online […]

Whether you call it hosted e-mail or e-mail as a service or utility e-mail, alternatives to traditional on-premises e-mail have been growing in prominence recently. And it makes sense: At best, e-mail services represent a simple cost of doing business-something that diverts a portion of IT staff resources away from projects more closely aligned with […]

Looking out at yesterday’s Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) outage through his Microsoft Watch-colored glasses, my colleague Joe Wilcox views the hosted storage slip-up as a selling point for Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services twist on cloud computing. The Software-plus-Services pitch goes something like this: Rather than jump into cloud-based services with both feet, organizations and individuals should […]

Back in March, when Apple unveiled the details of its eventual iPhone 2.0 upgrade, I opined that the company was on its way to seizing a slice of an enterprise smart-phone market in which the BlackBerry and the Treo currently reign. Now that I’ve tested the 2.0 firmware myself, I do still believe that the […]

Microsoft on July 8 unveiled pricing information for its new Online Services initiative, in which the software titan wraps Microsoft-hosted Exchange and SharePoint services into a few aggressively priced subscription-based offerings.While almost every organization relies upon e-mail (and, to a lesser extent, collaboration services), there are very few organizations for which e-mail server management expertise […]

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3, has emerged as popular storage option for Web-based businesses. However, S3 lacks a front end that’s suitable for direct use by individuals and organizations looking to tap the service-and its attractive 15 cents per gigabyte per month pricing-for their own online storage and backup needs. Enter Jungle Disk 2.0, […]

Last week in this space, I criticized Microsoft for continuing to burn cycles on superficial add-ons, such as multi-touch support in Windows Seven, while more significant pain points for Windows customers remain under-addressed. As I see it, Microsoft is busying itself tacking up fanciful moldings around its flagship product while the Windows through which millions […]

When considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite, one of the most important issues to evaluate is that of the success with which Office rivals such as OpenOffice.org can handle Microsoft’s ubiquitous binary file formats. Over the past few years, eWEEK Labs has approached the MS Office to OpenOffice.org file format fidelity issue several times. […]

If you asked a thousand people what Microsoft could do to Windows to improve the product, would even one of them describe a yearning to use his or her fingers to move objects around on a Windows desktop? And yet, as demonstrated at the recent D6 conference, Microsoft has chosen this feature, multitouch support for […]

When Microsoft, some time in the first half of 2009, makes good on its recent pledge to roll full support for the Open Document format into a second service pack for Office 2007, my reaction will be, “It’s about time.” In the meantime, we’re left to ponder why Microsoft has changed its mind about embracing […]