Enterprise software

Microsoft overhauls printing: Aims to ditch 'pray' part

Microsoft hopes to alleviate one of the oldest PC afflictions known to man: finding and installing printer drivers.

Getting drivers to work properly has always been a daunting task for many. A seemingly straightforward procedure can turn ugly in an instant.

And while driver installation has generally gotten better with each iteration of Windows, printer manufacturers always seem to find a way to gum up the works.

Enter Windows 8. In a blog post today titled Simplifying Printing in Windows 8, Microsoft said it is "reimagining" the print system for Windows 8.

All of that reimagining is incorporated … Read more

Microsoft explains how Windows 8 smokes Windows 7

Microsoft spelled out acceleration improvements in Windows 8, in a blog post Monday. Needless to say, Microsoft says the overall experience is a lot snappier.

The latest Building Windows 8 entry, penned by Rob Copeland, the group program manager at Microsoft's graphics team, is titled Hardware accelerating everything: Windows 8 graphics.

Some context is first provided at the top in order to illustrate how Window 8 "builds on the well-established foundations of DirectX graphics" in Windows 7.

In Windows 7, we expanded the capabilities of DirectX to provide a common hardware-accelerated graphics platform for a broader range … Read more

XP and Vista users, no Office 2013 for you

Still running XP or Vista and eyeing Office 2013? Sorry, you're out of luck.

Unveiled Monday, the upcoming new Office suite won't support Windows XP or Vista, meaning users who need or want Office 2013 will have to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8.

Microsoft confirmed the tighter requirements on its Office 2013 Preview Technet page. Only Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012 will be able to run the new suite.

Users will also need a PC with at least a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM for the 32-bit version (2GB … Read more

Microsoft touts touch in Office 2013

Microsoft is aiming Office 2013 at touch-screen devices as well as PCs. So the company is starting to pull out the stops to convince tablet users that the new Office is just right for them.

In a blog post yesterday, Clint Covington, a lead program manager for Microsoft's User Experience team, explained how touch works in the new suite. Products such as OneNote and Lync have been redesigned from the ground up to fully support touch. The other applications in Office have been "touch-enabled," which means they support certain touch features but remain true to their roots … Read more

This is not the future of Windows 8 convertibles

In case you missed it (which is likely), Fujitsu has entered the Windows 8-ready fray with a convertible "tablet PC."

You probably don't remember tablet PCs because they weren't big with consumers. Nor businesses for that matter.

But they've been around for at least a decade. For instance, there's the Compaq-branded Tablet PC TC1000 that Hewlett-Packard launched in 2002.

Or the more recent -- relatively speaking -- HP EliteBook Tablet PC series.

So now, in 2012, in the age of the svelte, 903g Microsoft Surface tablet, we have the 13-inch Fujitsu Lifebook T902 (PDF). … Read more

Dell CEO: Really, we're not a PC company anymore

Dell, which still generates a slight majority of its revenue from PCs, isn't really in the PC business anymore.

So says founder and CEO Michael Dell, who spent a majority of his time at a conference hosted by Fortune today speaking about corporate servers, storage, networking, security, and IT services -- anything, basically, but the PC business.

"In the last five years, we really made a concerted shift to end-to-end IT services," Dell said.

He calls it the "new Dell," a shift away from the PC business as the technology industry embraces the notion of … Read more

Google's SPDY wins new allies in plan to rebuild Web plumbing

SPDY, a Google project to try to speed up the Web, is gaining new allies interested in using it as a basis for rebuilding a fundamental Internet technolog that's remained largely unchanged since 1999.

SPDY reworks HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol by which Web browsers request Web pages and by which Web servers deliver those pages over the Internet. Every time you load a Web page, you use HTTP or its securely encrypted sibling, HTTPS. An upgrade would bring improvements to a vast number of people -- but on the flip side, making changes to something so basic and … Read more

New Microsoft Office gets more social

Announced today, Microsoft's latest Office suite will try to help users collaborate more easily through social media.

Demoing the new version of Office at a press conference, Kirk Koenigsbauer, a corporate vice president for Office, showed a five-person video chat using Microsoft's Lync application. In the demo, Koenigsbauer revealed how he could drag and drop someone from his buddy list into the live meeting.

Another participant was able to drop a PowerPoint presentation onto the shared canvas for all to see. Koenigsbauer then showed how users could draw directly on the presentation via a touch-screen device, which then … Read more

New Microsoft Office taps into the cloud

Microsoft's new version of Office will take heavy advantage of the cloud.

Demoing the upcoming new suite at a press conference today, Kirk Koenigsbauer, a corporate vice president for Office, explained how Office apps will sync key settings by using SkyDrive as a central repository.

After you sign in, you'll see the same settings, templates, dictionaries, and recent documents across all your Windows devices: PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

Using Word as an example, Koenigsbauer showed how users can insert pictures through the traditional Office.com clipart, through image searches via Bing, by opening something from SkyDrive, or by … Read more