A couple more execs from Microsoft’s list of who’s who at the company have moved to allegedly greener pastures. Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president and chief media officer of MSN, is leaving Microsoft to join Internet-based ad agency Spot Runner Inc, as initially reported by Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-intelligencer. Bradford most recently reported to Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portals & Advertising Platform Group. Bradford has been with Microsoft since 2001.

Bradford’s spot will be filled, in the interm, by Greg Nelson, a 12-year Microsoft veteran, Bishop reported. Meanwhile, on a different side of the Microsoft house, Amir Majidimehr, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft’s Consumer Media Technology Group, quietly has left the company.

In the past few months several U.S airlines–Alaska Air, American Airlines, Continental, JetBlue, Southwest, and Virgin America–have announced plans to offer Internet access on some routes. Why now? The equipment is cheaper and easier to install, business and leisure travelers are asking for it, and the Open Skies rules, which are about to go into effect, will suddenly give U.S. airlines more competition. Each airline is taking a different approach to the technology, features and pricing.

American Airlines and Virgin America will both offer Aircell’s gogo service, a cellular system that uses a version of EV-DO Rev A to deliver broadband speeds of 2Mbps on flights over North America. Aircell says the basic pricing will be about $12.95 for cross-country trips and $9.95 for flights lasting three hours or less. Starting this spring, American will outfit 15 of its Boeing 767s for gogo. It plans to target business travelers with laptops on popular routes between New York and San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami. Virgin America is taking a different approach. It hopes to offer gogo on all flights and for all passengers via the entertainment system in the seatbacks. No laptop required.

US officials said that "real and growing" threats to US computer and telecommunications networks were behind the holding of the largest-ever cyber-security exercises this week.

Computer security experts from five countries, more than 40 private sector companies, and numerous government and state agencies are spending a week fielding simulated "real-world," on-line attacks on the computer systems of government bodies, corporations, transportation and other key industries.

Is the United States under attack again? Recent reports have the U.S. military not quite blaming the Chinese military for a long string of cyber-attacks against U.S. military computers. It sure sounds like they believe it, but they’re not quite saying it. Also left unsaid is how much actual damage and compromise has happened already.

A Wall Street Journal article described how military networks are increasingly the targets of hackers. The targets are not limited to actual Department of Defense networks, but can also include defense industries and think tanks. The full article is available only to subscribers. Another detailed article on the same material is available on DailyTech.

You just rolled out Microsoft Windows Vista company-wide only to find your help desk flooded with calls. Or you spent hours with the mobile sales group going over the basics of laptop and wireless security only to discover team members still opening rogue email attachments and stumbling over password protocols. Sound familiar? The problem could be in your training.

It’s all too natural for IT to cast blame on end-users when new or upgraded systems hit snafus, but rather than pointing fingers, IT should instead consider its own role in training miscues, experts advise. While IT’s relationship with end-user training has always been ambivalent, the pressure is on to get users comfortable and productive on new tech systems, thanks to a corporate emphasis on information security, compliance, and return on investment to justify costly hardware and software rollouts.

One of the most important aspects of computer ownership is knowing how to protect your computer and the files that it contains. Before you can do that, you have to understand some of the things that might hinder that process and the steps you can take in order to prevent the loss of valuable files. As a grandparent and writer, Brenda Coxe tells us that nothing would upset her more than to lose years worth of hard work and irreplaceable pictures of her grandchildren that she holds on her computer.

Read this OutlookPower article.

The Office Open XML (OOXML) format may not have gotten ISO’s final blessing as an open standard yet, but Microsoft is finalizing plans to release a software development kit for it anyway.

Microsoft plans to put out the final beta of the OOXML SDK next month, and release Version 1.0 in May, according to Doug Mahugh, a technical evangelist at Microsoft. The final SDK beta and related information will be available at openxmldeveloper.org, openxmlcommunity.org, and microsoft.com.

The SDK will enable developers to write applications that can open, read, and otherwise work with OOXML documents, or port existing applications that work with documents in older Microsoft formats over to OOXML, Mahugh said. Moreover, the SDK will "put Microsoft on the hook to keep your app in line with the OOXML standard" as it changes, he said.

Big legal changes have been happening over the last few years with respect to the use of digital evidence in legal proceedings. Digital evidence is getting to be just about the only documentary evidence there is.

Research at Berkeley in 2003 showed that more than 92 percent of all corporate information was generated in electronic form. Nowadays, virtually all source information used in legal and regulatory proceedings will have been generated electronically. A recent white paper from the Microsoft U.S. National Security Team, entitled "The Evolving landscape of Legal Discovery & the Expanding Role of the Chief Information Officer," delves into these issues.

Russian blogger Savva Terentyev is being charged for inciting hatred toward the authorities for a post that, among other things, labeled the police "uneducated representatives of the animal world."

Terentyev said Wednesday that the charges were a result of a February 2007 posting in which he chastised local authorities for raiding an opposition newspaper.

Terentyev’s comments, first published by The Associated Press, come amid a government crackdown on Russian internet and media outlets.

The focus of Microsoft’s annual Convergence Conference has always been about the company’s line of Dynamics business applications. This year’s conference is no exception.

Microsoft announced what it refers to as "people-ready innovations" across the Microsoft Dynamics stack that includes ERP (enterprise resource planning) suites AX, NAV, SL and GL, and CRM (customer relationship management). The innovations include the next iteration of AX 2009, code-named AX 5.0, which includes more than 30 role-tailored interfaces, a new compliance center and an integrated workflow framework for more flexible business processes.

The company also announced an enhanced relationship with EDS, with EDS offering Dynamics CRM as an EDS enterprise application. The two companies also will jointly develop vertically oriented CRM applications. For its GP suite, Microsoft announced a new set of tools to help companies move quickly from QuickBooks to GP.