John Fontana

Microsoft has put its stake in the ground concerning unified communications, saying it plans to integrate e-mail, instant messaging, voice and video into a single platform stretching across corporate applications and services.

On the heels of the completion of Vista and Office, Microsoft Tuesday opened its annual IT Forum conference by confirming the road map for the next beta of Longhorn Server, announcing the release of its long-awaited PowerShell command line tool, and unveiling a host of new and upcoming releases of platform and application management tools.

Identity management technologies are beginning to weave together the application and network layers of corporate networks, significantly improving access control, easing management burdens and helping users meet stringent compliance and security mandates.

Google this month began to fill in the picture on how it plans to offer application services to enterprise customers when it introduced Google Apps for Education, a collection of collaboration tools and an API set for backend integration.

Confirming what might have been this year's worst kept secret, Microsoft Tuesday said users who buy PCs this holiday season loaded with Windows XP will get coupons for free or discounted upgrades to Vista when it ships next year.

One day after releasing a package of applications that hinted at how Google might offer collaboration services to corporate, the company announced that it was releasing an online word processing and spreadsheet application.

Quest Software earlier this month released management tools to help corporate users bring order to their Microsoft SharePoint roll-outs.

Scalent recently released Version 2.0 of its software designed to help corporate users virtualize the server, network and storage resources in their data centres.