Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Over the past several years, Microsoft and its partners have worked diligently with the PHP community to improve the experience PHP developers and users have on Windows Server and Windows Azure.  Now the PHP community supports Windows right alongside Linux, and this continues with today’s release of PHP 5.4.0.  We talked with René de Haas, CEO of a Dutch webhosting company called SoHosted, a partner who has been instrumental in improving the PHP on Windows experience.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

The key to unlocking future predictions has generally always been some type of data. Today, with the ever-increasing storage and computational capabilities of the cloud, combined with the sheer number of devices available to help people harness information, scientists around the world are learning how to interpret Mother Nature like never before. The depth of analysis and the types of prediction models that researchers are now able to create simply would not have been possible a mere few years ago, and Microsoft is honored to help play a role in some of these scenarios.

One special initiative has been the VENUS-C  (Virtual multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud infrastructures) series of projects, which has brought together the European Commission and a range of universities, research organizations, and companies, including Microsoft, to better understand and leverage the capabilities of the cloud. One of the projects includes the VENUS-C Fire application, which, when paired with Windows Azure and open source software, has helped firefighters on the Greek island of Lesvos to be more aware of fire risks and to provide faster, more effective responses.

We recently caught up with Dennis Gannon, Director of Cloud Research Strategy for Microsoft Research, to learn more about VENUS-C and how the projects are embracing both commercial and open source software:
 

Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Perhaps no trend has affected IT managers and developers more over the past year than the consumerization of IT. With seemingly every customer and employee tethered to a different device, it’s more critical than ever to enable cross-platform collaboration. That’s why we announced last week that the next service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM will enable customers to access the complete functionality of the application on virtually any mobile device, thanks to a new cloud-based, cross-platform native mobile client for Windows Phone 7, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices.

Posted by Thiago Almeida
Technical Evangelist, Microsoft New Zealand

Spreading the good word about Openness at Microsoft (check out our updated website!) and Windows Azure can take us far and wide, but we didn’t expect to find ourselves in the middle of Middle Earth. Let me explain…

Earlier this month, a few of us at Microsoft embarked on a road trip to talk with developers across New Zealand about Windows Azure and its support for a myriad of OSS technologies. Little did we know that New Zealand was also in the midst of celebrating the worldwide premiere of The Hobbit movie, with Wellington temporarily renamed the “Middle of Middle Earth.”

Posted by Sandy Gupta
General Manager, Open Solutions Group

I’m excited to be at the Open Source Business Conference today and to announce that in collaboration with SUSE, and based on our longstanding alliance, we are releasing a beta version of the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center. This management pack connects the Linux server management capabilities provided by SUSE Manager to System Center, Microsoft’s management platform. As a result, customers will be able to administer both Windows and Linux environments from a single management console. If you’d like to test out the Linux management capabilities this management pack provides for System Center, you can access it here.