Microsoft is beta testing a PC management service aimed at supporting midsized businesses, the company announced Monday.The service, called Intune, will be available to 1,000 users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

The service streamlines administrative functions by moving common administrative tasks to a hosted environment, eliminating the need to set up and manage in-house software for these tasks, said Microsoft group product marketing manager Sandrine Skinner.

We will see what Microsoft has on April 12th

A mysterious invite for a Microsoft event was sent out last week that didn’t shed a lot of light on what the upcoming event was about. Our moles, however, tell us that at that event on April 12th the company will show us what they have been working on under the codename of Project Pink.

Copenhagen - Secunia on Wednesday announced that their authenticated internal vulnerability scanner, the Corporate Software Inspector (CSI) 4.0, has been integrated with Microsoft Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) providing simplified patch management of Microsoft as well as third party programs.

Dave Probert says basic architecture needs rethink

While chip makers try to stack more cores on top of each other, a top kernel architect thinks they need to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems.

In his keynote at the RSA conference Tuesday, Microsoft's Scott Charney, corporate vice president of their Trustworthy Computing Group, raised several ideas for improving the general security of users on the Internet. One was to bring outside administration to consumer PCs.

Enterprise PCs have lots of security problems, but they are much better protected than consumer PCs in part because such companies have IT departments that can administer PCs and exercise authority over them, for instance forbidding users to run certain software and pushing security patches to their PCs.

At least according to the New York Times

The New York Times, which is one of Apple's favourite newspapers, has been seen giving Microsoft a bit of a hit with a rubber hose. Microsoft is quoted as saying that it has learnt a lot from the way Apple has gone into the mobile market and it will be learning from what it did.

It quotes Terry Myerson, vice president of Windows Phone Engineering at Microsoft as saying that the iPhone “opened our eyes” as to some of the things “that needed to be done that were not in our plan.

Microsoft launched a novel legal assault to take down a global network of PCs suspected of spreading spam and harmful computer code, adding what the company believes could become a potent weapon in the battle against cyber criminals.

But security experts say it isn't yet clear how effective Microsoft's approach will be, while online rights groups warn that the activities of innocent computer users could be inadvertently disrupted.

On Monday, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., granted Microsoft's request for an order to deactivate hundreds of Internet addresses that the company linked to

Microsoft and Yahoo, I now pronounce you husband and wife.

Yes, my fellow witnesses, the moment has arrived; the on-again, off-again courtship that dragged out for approximately 7,432 years has finally reached its climax.

Microsoft Yahoo Search DealMicrosoft and Yahoo announced on Thursday they'd gotten the go-ahead to complete their long-discussed search partnership. Both the U.S.

Judge chucks the case out

A lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers to download and install an update for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) under the guise that it was critical security update, has been thrown out of court.

The case was already getting shaky. A federal judge refused to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would have meant anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 could join the case without having to hire a lawyer.

The plaintiffs and Microsoft agreed to drop the lawsuit and now the Judge has officially thrown it out anyway.

With the Game Room, Microsoft's hoping to capture the old magic of video game arcades, minus the stale air, sugar highs, and wasted quarters.

I got some questions answered on service, which will be available on Windows and Xbox Live this spring. Here are the important details (if you're a retro game nerd):

-30 games will be available at launch, including Centipede, Lunar Lander, and Night Driver (full list here), from arcade systems as well as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Microsoft says it'll release 7 new games per week after launch.