[The articles below were posted between Dec. 25, 2006 and Jan. 22, 2007 and appear in the February 2007 hardcopy edition of Update.]

Server Platforms

Exchange 2007 a Boon to IT

Exchange 2007 offers IT professionals in large organizations a slew of important new capabilities that should drive down costs while lessening IT workloads, but upgrading will be expensive

Exchange 2007 Assists Regulatory Compliance

Exchange 2007 includes features aimed at corporate officers legally responsible for compliance with document retention regulations, which could provide one of the most important reasons to upgrade

Document Management with SharePoint Server 2007

Prebuilt workflows and better document libraries make SharePoint Server 2007 more suitable for document management than previous versions, but those solutions could fail if considered burdensome by workers

Outlook 2007 Integration with SharePoint

Outlook 2007 allows users read-write access to group calendars, task lists, contacts, and other information stored on a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 team site

Enterprise Search Offerings Postponed

A unified client for desktop, enterprise, and Web search has been postponed; a planned SharePoint feature for finding people with particular expertise is now an unsupported add-on

Windows & Mobile

Draft Kernel Patch Protection API Published

A draft specification for an API to extend the Windows kernel has been released, but the API will not be available until the currently unscheduled first Vista service pack

Vista Retail Pricing, Incentives

Consumers can upgrade Vista in place by purchasing a key online and can get discounts if they buy Ultimate at retail; Microsoft will sell and distribute Vista over the Internet

Jan. 2007 Security Updates

Jan. 2007's 'Patch Tuesday' included four patches—three critical and one important—for Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office, but some zero-day exploits for Office remain unpatched

Development Tools & Programs

SharePoint Designer Updates FrontPage

SharePoint Designer, a successor to FrontPage for customization of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Server sites, has shipped to volume license customers

Expression Web Ships

The new Expression Web, a successor to FrontPage, enables creation and maintenance of Web sites using Cascading Style Sheets and ASP.NET 2.0

Tools Updated for Office 2007

A free update to Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office offers support for Office 2007 and more flexible options for building and deploying applications for Office 2003

SQL Server Compact Edition Moves to Desktops

A new edition of SQL Server allows developers to embed database functionality directly into their applications

Business Applications & Services

Office Suite Improves Deployment, Maintenance

The Office installation utility, Setup, has undergone major changes that will streamline Office 2007 deployment and maintenance

Office 2007 Pricing Finalized

The Office suite's next version has shipped to volume license customers; pricing of the new suite is comparable to that of past versions

Project Desktop Editions Updated

Project 2007, the latest version of Microsoft's desktop-based project management software, has been improved, but the new version is incompatible with earlier versions of Project Server

Retail Applications Ship Second Versions

Dynamics Point of Sale 2.0 comes bundled with Office Accounting, Microsoft's entry-level accounting application; bundling could help Microsoft challenge Intuit, which does not bundle its point-of-sale software and accounting applications

Consumer Products & Services

Focus Moves Beyond PC at CES 2007

The most significant new products and partnerships Microsoft announced at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) had little direct connection to the Windows PC