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Microsoft on Tuesday revealed pricing details for a new server software bundle aimed at midsize companies and the next version of its Small Business Server product.

Microsoft also made available preview versions of those products– Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and Windows Small Business Server 2008– for download and evaluation.

Both products have been undergoing private testing. Tuesday's previews allow Microsoft to receive feedback from a larger audience before releasing the products, which it expects to do by the end of the year, the company said.

Microsoft is offering a standard version of Windows Essential Business Server 2008, including five client access licenses (CALs), for US$5,472; additional CALs will cost $81 each. CALs are required for each desktop user accessing server software products from Microsoft. A premium edition of Essential Business Server 2008 will be available for $7,163, a price that also includes five CALs. Additional CALs for the premium edition will cost $195 each.

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Standard Edition, with five CALs, will cost $1,089, Microsoft said. Additional CALs for the software are available for $77 each. A premium edition of the product, including five CALs, will cost $1,899; additional CALs are $189 each for that product.

Pricing for Small Business Server has gone up from the current version of Small Business Server 2003 R2, which is $599 with five client access licenses for the standard edition and $1,299 with five CALs for the premium edition. Microsoft said the pricing has gone up because the latest version of the product includes more technology and services than the previous version of the product.

Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008, formally code-named “Cougar,” and Windows Essential Business Server 2008, formerly code-named “Centro,” are part of Microsoft's new Windows Essential Server Solutions line. The products in the Essential line combine Microsoft's Windows Server OS with other software products the company deems necessary to running a business, to provide what it describes as an all-in-one, easy-to-install software stack for companies that may only have a small IT support staff.

Essential Business Server includes three copies of Windows Server 2008 running on three hardware servers. The first server is a domain controller and management server that includes the Windows Essential Business Unified Management Console.

System-management products in the offering include Microsoft System Center Essentials, Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP and DNS, all of which are built onto Windows Server 2008. The second server in the Essential Business Server stack is for e-mail; it runs Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition, Microsoft said. The third server is a security server running Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Threat Management Gateway.

The premium edition of Essential Business Server 2008 will include a fourth version of Windows Server 2008 on a fourth piece of hardware running SQL Server 2008, Microsoft said.

Aside from its price and new features, another change to Small Business Server 2008 is that it will be offered for 64-bit servers only; previous versions were available for 32-bit servers. Microsoft has said that going forward, it will be offering most of its software in 64-bit versions only, to encourage customers to move to the 64-bit version of Windows Server. For instance, the latest version of Exchange Server is available only for x64 servers, while previous versions also supported 32-bit hardware.

Small Business Server is an integrated offering of Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. It also includes Microsoft's Office Live Small Business service and 120-day trial subscriptions to Forefront Security for Exchange and Windows Live OneCare for Server. The premium edition of the software includes an additional license for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

WASHINGTON - Losing the audio feed during “Monday Night Football” may seem like a crisis for some sports fan, but it’s nothing compared to losing the signal that monitors a critically ill hospital patient.

The technical glitches share a potential source: the proposed use of unoccupied TV airwaves for high-speed Internet service across the country.

While television networks and wireless microphone users have been fighting the idea, the medical community is also sounding the alarm over possible interference from unlicensed portable gizmos operating in a nearby spectrum. The spectrum’s valuable wireless real estate has attracted technology companies and consumer advocates who say it shouldn’t remain vacant.

Hospitals and medical device makers say using empty channels for unlicensed uses is a matter of life and death, not just a source of static for entertainment outlets. It could disrupt the monitoring of patients’ heart rates, blood oxygen levels and other vital signs at medical facilities.

“If they stop functioning for a period of time, you don’t know the patient’s physiological condition. This is patient care at its most basic level,” says Dale Woodin, executive director of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering, an arm of the American Hospital Association.

Medical device maker GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Co., has also weighed in, asking the Federal Communications Commission to proceed carefully in its decision to permit broadband use through those idle channels, commonly known as “white spaces.”

In an FCC filing last week, the company requested stricter standards to protect wireless patient-monitoring equipment, such as heart, blood pressure and respiration devices, from being overwhelmed by other equipment operating in nearby channels.

The FCC is conducting tests to find an efficient and interference-free way to use the spectrum for broadband, but several trial devices have either broken down or failed. A spokesman said some additional lab tests may be needed, but the agency will start field testing soon.

Those white spaces, prized for their ability to travel long distances and go through walls, will be made available when the nation makes a transition to digital TV next February. After the switch, broadcasters will occupy channels 2 through 51, but almost half those channels in some cities will remain fallow, especially in rural areas where there are fewer broadcasters.

Technology companies, including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc., have said low-powered, unlicensed and portable devices such as cell phones, laptops and BlackBerrys, can operate safely in the empty spectrum without harming other signals. They say it will provide affordable high-speed Internet and spur innovation.

But its potential effect on everything from baseball calls to banjo picking has attracted increasingly loud and powerful opponents. Television broadcasters, telecom carriers and wireless microphone makers and users, including Major League Baseball and the Grand Ole Opry, have rejected several proposals from the tech coalition.

“The white spaces proposals being considered by the FCC could turn ‘Music City’ into a silent city unless they get it right,” Steve Gibson, music director and producer of broadcast audio for the Grand Ole Opry, said in a statement Tuesday. The country music venue is operated by Nashville, Tenn.-based Gaylord Entertainment Co.

Unlike the broadcasters and wireless mic users, GE Healthcare and ASHE say they’re not against the technology coalition’s proposal, but want tougher technical standards implemented to lessen any potential risks. They’ve have had several discussions with the FCC and technology companies to find a compromise.

Attorney Scott Blake Harris, who represents several technology companies, said Tuesday the coalition has agreed to the substance of GE Healthcare’s proposal.

“There are no insurmountable technical hurdles here,” he added.

Since the 1980s, hospitals across the country have been using channels 33 to 36 to operate unlicensed wireless patient-monitoring devices. In 2000, the FCC allocated channel 37 for exclusive use of medical-monitoring equipment after a 1998 incident in which a TV broadcaster interfered with a nearby hospital’s low-powered heart monitors. No patients were harmed, but hospital officials have said it could have serious injury or death.

While most hospitals have migrated to the protected channel, some still operate outside it.

GE Healthcare, one of the top manufacturers of such devices, previously proposed that if white spaces are approved for Internet use, the FCC should prohibit such operation within channels 33 to 36 for at least one year — until February 2010. This would give dozens more hospitals monitoring thousands of patients more time to migrate to the protected channel 37, said Tim Kottak, engineering general manager of systems and wireless for GE Healthcare.

“Some are very aware of this pending (initiative), but others have no idea and that’s a risk,” he said. However, hospitals aren’t required to move to the protected channel.

Those measures may not be enough. Unlicensed, portable Internet devices operating in the adjacent empty channels next to the exclusive medical-device one may be too powerful, bleed into it and “overload” hospitals systems, which normally emit weaker wireless signals, said Kottak.

The FCC needs to enact stricter standards for how much power Internet devices can emit in the adjacent channels to lessen risk to medical equipment, according to the medical community.

LUXEMBOURG - A British watchdog agency said Tuesday it had complained to European Union regulators that Microsoft Corp.’s new file format for storing documents discouraged competition.

Britain’s agency for education and information technology said it wanted to help the EU with an investigation it launched in January into whether the software giant deliberately withheld information from rivals. The current controversy centers on the ability of other companies to create products compatible with Microsoft’s new file format, Office Open XML, which stores Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

This comes on the heels of other EU antitrust action against Microsoft Corp. that resulted in $2.63 billion in fines over how Microsoft’s Windows operating system works with rivals’ programs and how it was bundled for sale.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency said it told the European Commission that barriers to interoperability — to programs working smoothly with one another — hurt students and teachers.

“Impediments to interoperability limit choice,” the agency said. “In the context of the education system, this can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects.”

Microsoft spokeswoman Anne-Sophie de Brancion said in an e-mail statement that the company would cooperate with the British agency and the European Commission.

“Microsoft is deeply committed to education and interoperability,” de Brancion’s statement said. She said the company has funded development of tools that help Microsoft “Office” programs work with files in what’s known as OpenDocument Format.

The Redmond, Washington-based company is the largest software company in the world and one of the largest software suppliers to British schools.

In October, the British agency filed a complaint with Britain’s Office of Fair Trading objecting to “the existence of impediments to effective interoperability in relation to Microsoft’s 2007 product.”

Critics of Microsoft’s new Office Open XML, or OOXML, file format claim it locks out competitors, giving Microsoft customers no choice but to keep buying Microsoft programs forever. Microsoft claims its format is a more useful and varied alternative to OpenDocument Format, or ODF, which is backed by Sun Microsystems, IBM and others.

Office Open XML was last month approved as an international standard, which paves the way for it to be picked up by the IT departments of governments and large corporations.

The British agency said problems using Office 2007 software would be compounded by Microsoft’s refusal to offer the same support to users of OpenDocument Format that it gives to Office Open XML.

“Such circumstances would constitute a barrier to the uptake and use of competitor products and limit competition and choice for educational users,” the agency said.

The agency also said British regulators were still looking into its complaint about Microsoft’s license conditions for school software, where the agency alleged “anticompetitive licensing practices.”

In 2005, the British watchdog agency said primary schools could save up to 50 percent and secondary schools up to 25 percent if they dumped proprietary software — like Microsoft’s — in favor of free, or open source, products.

Apple's iPhone continues its march around the world, with new announcements of deals with carriers in the Asia region and Australia.

The agreements are with Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (SingTel) for that country, and with three of SingTel's affiliates in India, the Philippines, and Australia. The iPhone will be released in the four countries later this year.

New Product Launches?

India's leading mobile carrier, Bharti Airtel Ltd., is 30 percent owned by SingTel and has more than 260 million mobile users in what is now the world's fastest-growing market for wireless devices and services. Optus, owned by SingTel, will make the iPhone available in Australia, and Globe Telecom, co-owned by SingTel and Ayala Corp., will be the carrier in the Philipines.

Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said Apple very carefully made a few carrier announcements in the first stages of the iPhone's release. “First, it was just AT&T, then a few European carriers,” he said, adding that “now, every time you turn around they're adding a few more.” He suggested this flurry of partner announcements could herald new product launches.

Apple said Monday that its online stores in the U.S. and the United Kingdom are sold out of iPhones. Selling out current inventory could also be a sign of new products on the way.

Not Exclusives

Greengart also noted that Apple seems to be changing its strategy of demanding exclusive arrangements in each country.

Last week, for example, Apple announced an agreement with Vodafone to sell the iPhone in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa, and Turkey, as well as in Australia and India, which are also covered by SingTel companies. Similarly, Apple has announced that it will be selling the iPhone in Italy through Telecom Italia in addition to Vodafone.

Some observers have noted that in developing markets, such as India, the first time many customers will access the Internet will be through an iPhone. India, for instance, has a population of more than a billion people and, although most of the country doesn't have a cell phone, the portion that does represents a large number of customers.

The announcements of more markets and more partners, however, can help Apple reach its announced goal of 10 million iPhones sold worldwide by the end of this year. As of the quarter ending March 31, Apple reported selling about 5.4 million units.

As with other recent announcements, the SingTel agreements did not mention pricing or whether the iPhone may be the 3G version. Greengart has speculated that the announcement of a 3G version will come relatively soon, so Apple can get it out in time for the holiday season.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel (S.N) faced multiple questions about how it will turn itself around and stop customers from fleeing its cell phone service at its annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday.

“Verizon and AT&T have been eating our lunch,” in winning high-value customers, one attendee told Chief Executive Dan Hesse during a webcast of the meeting.

“How did we get into this situation?” and how will Sprint resolve it, the person asked.

The meeting was held a day after Sprint said its first-quarter net loss widened to $505 million from $211 million in the year-ago quarter as it lost more than a million high-value customers who pay monthly bills and commit to service contracts of one or two years.

Hesse said while Sprint was beginning to see improvements, turning around its performance would “take time.”

He conceded that Sprint's top rivals AT&T Inc (T.N) and Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L), have focused more on customers with prime credit ratings, while Sprint has more customers who have subprime credit ratings and more trouble paying bills.

He said the company would address this by focusing first on keeping its existing customers and by trying to sign on new subscribers who are committed to contracts and less likely to cancel their services as quickly as subprime customers.

“Customers leaving us, on average, have had a higher (average revenue per user) than the customers we're bringing in,” Hesse acknowledged; but he said Sprint's offer of unlimited data and voice services for $99.99 a month should change that.

“We didn't have a compelling offering to keep them,” said Hesse, who also said the unlimited service offering would likely reduce the number of calls to Sprint customer services, which has been blamed to a large extent for subscriber frustration.

“When you take the meter off everything, one would hope they'd never call to question their bill because it will always be the same,” said Hesse.

Asked about work force reduction efforts at Sprint, which has laid off 4,000 employees, Hesse said the company would not scale back customer services operations unless customer calls were reduced.

“As we reduce the number of calls coming in, we can reduce the number of people answering the phone,” said Hesse, who noted that any cutbacks would start at call centers run by third parties rather than at Sprint's in-house service operations.

Shareholders cast the vast majority of their votes to approve the company's slate of nine board members.

They narrowly rejected a shareholder proposal for shareholders to be allowed to call special shareholder meetings. About 54 percent of the votes were cast against the proposal while 46 percent were in favor.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

TORONTO (Reuters) - More than one-third of workers would choose their mobile phone over their wallet, keys, laptop or digital music player if they had to leave the house for 24 hours and could take only one item, a new survey has found.

The survey, conducted by market research firm IDC and sponsored by Nortel Networks Corp (NT.TO) (NT.N), found that while more than 38 percent of the 2,367 people polled chose their mobile phones, less than 30 percent chose their wallets first.

Through the survey, Nortel — North America's biggest maker of telephone gear — was looking to find out how many workers around the world can be defined as “hyperconnected,” or as those who have fully embraced multiple devices like cellphones and laptops, as well as applications like e-mail or social networking sites like Facebook.

The answer: 16 percent, and growing.

The survey classified the hyperconnected worker as someone who uses at least seven devices for work and personal access, in addition to at least nine applications like instant messaging, text messaging or web conferencing.

The country with the highest percentage of hyperconnected respondents in the study was China. Canada and the United Arab Emirates had the fewest number among the 17 countries covered in the survey.

The survey also predicts the number of the hyperconnected will likely rise to 40 percent in five years. That could bode well for Toronto-based Nortel, which has bet heavily on the hope that as bandwidth and network demand soar with more devices connecting to the Internet, so too will demand for the network technologies it makes.

The group of hard-core communications users is followed by a larger subset — 36 percent of respondents — designated as “increasingly connected,” the study states. These workers use a minimum of four devices and six applications.

However, the hope for a flood of new devices going online have yet to translate into a more robust bottom line for Nortel, which has struggled since the technology bubble burst earlier this decade.

The company predicts revenue growth for the year will be in the low single digits. It also announced 2,100 new job cuts in February, on top of the thousands it has slashed since 2001.

It estimates it could be years before some of the newer technologies it has designed will find big markets. Meantime, competition is fierce as low-cost Asian vendors like Huawei Technologies muscle in for market share.

Nortel shares were down 30 Canadian cents to C$7.90 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. In March, they slumped to C$6.45. Adjusted to take account of a stock consolidation in late 2006, it was a low not seen since 1981.

($1=$1.00 Canadian)

(Reporting by Wojtek Dabrowski; editing by Rob Wilson)

One in four respondents to a new US corporate IT spending survey by ChangeWave Research said their company will spend less on software in coming months.

The 25 percent figure is 3 points higher than a study ChangeWave conducted in January and 11 points higher than one completed in October, indicating a deepening trend.

Meanwhile, 55 percent said their software spending will not change in the next 90 days, and just 12 percent indicated it will rise, according to ChangeWave.

Cuts to capital budgets appear to be a factor, according to the survey. Twenty-six percent of people who took it said their capital budgets had been cut over the past three months, a 4 point rise from January. In contrast, only 8 percent reported an increase in their capital budgets, ChangeWave said.

However, 27 percent reported they simply did not need to buy any new software, down two points from the January survey.

A number of major software categories, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) applications, showed weakness moving forward.

But spending on two, virtualization and security, will see a modest jump in the next 90 days, according to the study.

ChangeWave Research, based in Rockville, Maryland, polled 1,956 people involved with corporate IT spending from April 8-15.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Hewlett-Packard Co. announced plans Tuesday to buy Electronic Data Systems in a tie-up that creates a global powerhouse in computer services to compete against IBM.

World leading computer maker HP said it would buy Texas-based business services outsourcing titan EDS for 25 dollars a share in cash, in a deal valued at 13.9 billion dollars.

“The combination of HP and EDS will create a leading force in global IT services,” said Mark Hurd, HP chairman and chief executive.

“Together, we will be a stronger business partner, delivering customers the broadest, most competitive portfolio of products and services in the industry. This reinforces our commitment to help customers manage and transform their technology to achieve better results.”

California-based HP's massive data centers and experience in business computing hardware would mesh well with the expertise EDS has in outsourcing technical services for companies, according to analysts.

“It is a very bold move but I wouldn't say it's a super surprising move given what HP's core strengths are,” IDC executive vice president of worldwide research Crawford Del Prete told AFP when news of talks was announced Monday.

“They complement each other very well. There is a lot of synergy that can go on.”

Analysts at Briefing.com said: “Adding EDS would expand HP's service offering and also increase its market share in the industry, helping it better compete with industry heavyweight IBM.”

EDS says at its website that it founded the information technology outsourcing industry in 1962 and is now a multibillion-dollar company handling services for banks, hospitals, shops, energy producers and other firms.

The price represents a premium of 32.6 percent to Friday's close for EDS shares.

The companies' combined services businesses had annual revenue of more than 38 billion dollars at the end of fiscal 2007. HP said its services revenue totaled 16.6 billion for fiscal 2007, so the acquisition more than doubles its business in this area.

EDS was founded by Ross Perot, who became a billionaire and presidential candidate, by paying an incoporation fee of 1,000 dollars, and buying unused computer time at an insurance company to process data for other firms, according to a company history. It grew into a company with some 20 billion dollars in annual revenues.

HP, in a separate earnings report, announced a preliminary profit amounting to 80 cents per share, below most Wall Street estimates. Revenue rose to 28.3 billion dollars for its fiscal second quarter compared with 25.5 billion one year ago.

The company said it would provide more details in an earnings report next week.

Engineers testing a recently launched Japanese data communications satellite have succeeded in establishing a two-way Internet link running at 1.2G bps (bits per second) each way, they said Monday.

The speed represents a record for satellite communications, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

The tests were carried out on May 2 as part of verification of the Kizuna satellite. In the tests data was transmitted on two 622M-bps channels both up to the satellite and down to a receiving antenna. Together the combined data transmission speed was 1.2G bps.

Kizuna was launched on Feb. 23 and is intended to provide high-speed Internet links to homes and offices in remote areas, to organizations as a back-up during natural disasters and to improve regional communications links in Asia.

One of the satellite's special features is an on-board Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch. In other satellite Internet systems data sent to the satellite has to be sent to an earth station, demodulated, switched to its destination and then remodulated and sent again via the satellite to reach its destination. With a switch onboard the satellite is capable of doing all this in space thus making more efficient use of the available frequency spectrum, according to JAXA.

Tests carried out in March and April verified uplink communications at 1.5M bps and downlink at 155M bps using a compact 45-centimeter antenna and both up and downstream at 155M bps using a larger 1.2-meter dish. At the time JAXA said the 155M-bps downlink was the fastest in the world achieved with such a small-size antenna.

Twirling galaxies, exotic nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for amateur astronomers.

Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.

Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“[It’s] a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well,” said Roy Williams of the California Institute of Technology

Detailed view

To use the new system, users need to download WorldWide Telescope from the web. It only runs on Windows operating systems.

The web portal gives star-gazers access to “terabytes” of data. It allows them to explore planets, moons and other celestial objects and track their precise position in the sky from any location on Earth, “at any time in the past or future”.

Data from sources including the US space agency Nasa allows users to switch between views at different wavelengths and through different telescopes.

Nasa contributed imagery from its Mars Rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Around 30 images from Chandra are available through the program including X-ray data and multi-wavelength composite photographs.

Other data sets include the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey, also known as the Cosmic Genome Project, which aims to capture detailed optical images of more than a quarter of the night sky.

WorldWide Telescope, launched as a beta, or test version, also features tours of the Universe by leading astronomers, as well as the ability for a user to record their own.

A tour called Dust and Us by Alyssa Goodman, professor of astronomy at Harvard, walks through the dark regions in galaxies where stars and planets form.

“I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission,” said Robert Kirshner, professor of astronomy at Harvard University.

“[It] gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their imagination.”

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, described it as a “powerful tool for education” and said he hoped it would “inspire young people to explore astronomy and science”.

Stellar options

Microsoft’s new application is not the only tool that allows astronomers to explore the night sky from their computers.

Last year, Microsoft rival Google launched Sky, an add-on to Google Earth which allows astronomers to glide through images of more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies.

Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.

Other applications have been available for longer.

For example, Stellarium is a free open source tool that gives people a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to planets and moons.

The project was launched in 2001 by Fabien Chereau, a Research Engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory, and is used in many planetariums.

Like WorldWide Telescope the software allows users to record and play their own tours of the Universe.