Nobody would have believed this as little as two years ago, but Sun Microsystems and former bitter rival Microsoft announced that theyhave opened an "interoperability center" on Microsoft’s campus for optimizing Windows applications to run on the Sun Fire x64 server storage machines.

In addition, Sun said that it now has made available its own "infrastructure solutions" to run on the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server, v2007.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner’s Open Source Conference and Linux World. Zemlin met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill to talk about Linux topics ranging from overtures to Microsoft to the progress of Linux on the desktop.

On the eve of Microsoft’s plans to fix a 2-month-old vulnerability affecting Microsoft Excel, security experts warn that booby-trapped Excel documents are circulating with malicious executables.

According to an alert issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a malicious Trojan has been rigged into .xls files that are being distributed via email.

"Known file names for these attachments are OLYMPIC.XLS and SCHEDULE.XLS. These files may also contain Windows binary executables that can compromise an affected system," according to the US-CERT warning.

Microsoft admitted on a technical blog on March 10 that Windows Home Server can corrupt data when used with a wide variety of common applications.

According to the blog posting, Microsoft has been aware of the "data corruption issue" since "late December 2007." Specifically, Microsoft states in its KnowledgeBase listing that on servers with more than one hard drive running Windows Home Server users can experience data corruption with Windows Vista Photo Gallery; Windows Live Photo Gallery; Microsoft Office OneNote 2007; Microsoft Office OneNote 2003; Microsoft Office Outlook 2007; Microsoft Money 2007; SyncToy 2.0 Beta; Intuit QuickBooks; and uTorrent, the popular BitTorrent client.

Spam and virus threats to enterprise messaging security and compliance may level off this year compared to 2007, but social engineering techniques are evolving to challenge businesses and security software providers, according to a new report released by Google’s Postini team.

The report, released March 6 after Google’s Postini team commissioned the study to survey 575 IT professionals, found that Postini data centers recorded 57 percent more spam and virus attacks in 2007 compared to 2006. The size of spam emails also increased considerably as spammers included images, .pdf files, documents, spreadsheets and even multimedia files to spoof spam filters, according to report author Adam Swidler, senior solutions marketing manager for Postini.

When Microsoft announced it was bringing query processing and storage capabilities into the cloud with its SQL Server Data Services offering, industry watchers took notice.

Time will tell, however, whether other major database players will follow suit with offerings of their own.

Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Services is not exactly SQL Server on the Web; instead, it is meant as a scalable on-demand data storage and query processing Web service comparable, some analysts said, to Amazon’s SimpleDB service.

From Ma Bell to Wintel, the IT sector tends to be defined by its 800-pound gorillas–the massive companies that have positioned themselves to grab a share of the daily computing activities of most every organization and individual.

These are the companies that many of us love to hate. On one hand, tech’s largest vendors provide the market influence and financial muscle to translate nascent technologies and standards into the consumable, supportable products that enterprises require to carry out their business. On the other hand, the fiduciary obligations that these titans owe to their shareholders compel them to squeeze out as much revenue–and pursue as much product lock-in–as their customers will accept.

Companies are increasingly using consumer technologies like wikis and blogs and social networking sites like LinkedIn and MySpace for promoting their business and for researching what the competition is up to. They should do so with caution, though, experts say–while these sites are free and easy to use, slipshod execution can backfire on a business.

About 25 percent of businesses with less than 250 employees use social networking sites at least once a month to find business contacts, while about 12 percent have business profiles on networking sites to promote their businesses, according to a survey released by JupiterResearch in February.

Trend Micro, supplier of network antivirus and Internet content security software and services, announced its message archiving solution designed to help companies archive with accessibility and encryption, reduce email management costs, and protect and preserve the integrity of their electronic data.

Trend Micro Message Archiver delivers a fast, on-demand email search capability so employees can quickly access any archived email without leaving Microsoft Outlook, or the need for IT support; installation time averages 30 minutes. The solution’s tamper-resistant design, combined with forensics technology that uses digital fingerprinting and encryption, ensures that emails are authentic and un-altered for automatic legal compliance.

Ray Ozzie’s keynote at the Microsoft MIX 2008 developer conference should be noted for what he showed developers, not for what he promised.

Ozzie uttered a lot of the usual bromides about Microsoft’s (and arguably not his) vision of software plus service: from the announced public beta of Office Live Workspace, an online collaboration space for Office productivity tools, to the vaguely defined SQL Server Data Services, also in beta, Microsoft still seems unprepared to fully embrace SAAS.

He wasn’t very convincing when he said that he looked forward to sharing more specifics about Microsoft’s enterprise offerings later this year, because as Joe Wilcox noted in not so many words, so much of what Ozzie said sounded like vaporware on a loop.