Microsoft Office Accounting, financial management software for small businesses, and Microsoft Office Live, a Web-based service for small businesses, are teaming up with the City of Miami to provide free Office Accounting Express software and Web site training for small businesses, college professionals and budding entrepreneurs during the Economic Business Seminar as part of the ACCESS MIAMI initiative.

According to a study by Bizjournals, Miami is one of the country’s five best markets for small businesses. However, small businesses often lack easy and affordable software to help them manage their finances and build an online presence.

Microsoft Office Accounting and Office Live are teaming with the City of Miami to help empower business success by equipping students and entrepreneurs with tools and training.

Microsoft is working with state officials in Louisiana to offer Windows and Office software free for a year to small businesses still feeling the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new program, called the Software License Relief Program, in conjunction with the 2007 Hope & Recovery Summit, which is commemorating the second anniversary of both storms. Microsoft is working with the Louisiana Small Business Development Center to offer the program, which will launch next month and gives eligible small businesses access to software from Microsoft, including Windows and Office, free of charge for a year.

In the interest of making it easier for its people to reach each other even when they’re not online, Yahoo added the ability for users to send text or instant messages from a computer to a cell phone via Yahoo’s Web mail software.

Users of Yahoo Mail can now send free text messages to mobile phone numbers in the U.S., Canada, India, and the Philippines, and send IMs to users of Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

Saturday’s bizarre widespread WindowsGenuine "validation" failure is just another Microsoft penalty against legitimate customers. The failure meant that people activating/validating Windows Vista received notifications that their software is counterfeit.

Acer plans to acquire Gateway in a deal worth $710 million that Acer says will make it the world’s third-largest PC vendor.

Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, Acer will purchase all of Gateway’s outstanding shares for $1.90 per share. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors at both companies and should be completed by the end of this year, subject to government approval, Acer said in a statement. Gateway’s shares ended at $1.21 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.

In a reversal, the American representative to the ISO standards body is now tentatively supporting the approval of Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

The executive board of the Washington, D.C.-based International Committee for Information Technology Standards voted to approve a "Yes with comments" motion for Open XML, the native document format in Office 2007.

Twelve members voted yes, three voted no, and one abstained. A two-thirds majority is needed to pass.

According to a new survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value, the amount of personal time that consumers now spend on the Internet rivals the amount of time they spend watching TV.

A total of 66 percent of the new survey’s respondents reported viewing television programs from one to four hours per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet use. Moreover, researchers said the traditional TV set is increasingly taking a back seat to PCs and cellular handsets among consumers between the ages of 18 and 34.

Microsoft has replacedits controversial anti-Linux "Get the Facts" Web site with a kinder, gentler site explaining how its Windows Server operating system compares to open-source Linux as well as other competitive OSes.

The new WindowsServer/Compare Web site provides information about how Windows Server stacks up in total cost of ownership, reliability, security, manageability and interoperability with Linux, Unix, and IBM’s mainframe architecture.

Trend Micro has patched several vulnerabilities in its ServerProtect, Anti-Spyware and PC-cillin products that could be exploited remotely to allow hackers to execute arbitrary code.

Several vulnerabilities affected ServerProtect, which provides anti-virus protection for Microsoft Windows and Novell NetWare servers. According to researchers at iDefense Labs, in Sterling, Va., an integer overflow exists within the RPCFN_SYNC_TASK function, which allocates memory based on a user-supplied integer within the request data.

It would seem that some ISPs have begun filtering outgoing mail not just for spam, but personal emails as well; and deciding whether or not to pass that email on to its destination. This article has details regarding Cox’s use of this practice, but it would seem this editor is experiencing the same behavior with Mediacom.