Microsoft said on Thursday it would make key technology elements of some of its best-selling software widely available to boost interoperability with its competitors and customers.

To make connecting with third-party software easier, Microsoft will publish on its Web site key software blueprints, known as application program interfaces, pertaining to its high-volume products used by other Microsoft merchandise.

In Kathy T. Evans-Davis’ last article, she showed you MAPILab’s Attachments Process for Outlook. In this article, she reviews Sperry Software’s Attachment Save for Microsoft Outlook (Version 4.0), which is an excellent product for automatically managing those email attachments, worry-free. Which one should you buy? You’ll have to read her article to find out.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Yahoo has introduced two new severance plans that will protect its employees if Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid is successful, it said in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday. The new plans filed make all full-time employees eligible for severance pay equal to base salary for four months to 24 months, depending on the employee’s job level. Health and dental coverage is also included.

The maximum protection of 24 months’ salary will be offered to CEO Jerry Yang, Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, and certain other executives still employed by the company and named in the SEC proxy filing for Yahoo’s 2007 annual general meeting. That list includes former CFO Susan Decker, now president of the company, and Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary Michael Callahan. Others listed in the proxy filing have already left the company, including former Chairman Terry Semel, former Chief Operating Officer Daniel Rosensweig and former Chief Technology Officer Farzad Nazem.

Exclaimer, provider of email utilities for Microsoft Exchange environments, announced that its newest software suite, Exclaimer Mail Utilities 2007, will be unveiled for the first time in Europe at CeBIT 2008, March 4-9 in Hannover, Germany. Launched late last year, Mail Utilities 2007 is the first available suite of software tools that provide significant email enhancements to organizations using Microsoft Exchange 2007. The latest incarnation of Exclaimer’s flagship product suite is designed for organizations that have implemented Exchange 2007 and want to utilize all the benefits that Exclaimer Mail Utilities offers.

Exclaimer Mail Utilities 2007 allows organizations to execute a host of powerful mail features at the server level, ensuring compliance with corporate-wide policies and procedures. It provides the ability to add disclaimers and signatures to outgoing email, take advantage of industry-leading anti-spam technology, establish auto-responder messages from any email address, perform email blocking and redirection functions, and perform a wide range of automated actions via a powerful rules engine.

Microsoft plans to arm students with the company’s developer and design tools for free to help them fulfill their creative goals now and to help seed the market for developers working on the Microsoft platform in the future.

In a speech at Stanford University, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is expected to formally launch the effort known as the Microsoft DreamSpark student program. The DreamSpark program makes available, at no charge, a broad range of development and design software for download. The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

If Microsoft is serious about its bid for Yahoo, why haven’t we heard more from the software giant?

Having been informally rejected by Yahoo, the software maker is awaiting a formal rejection before going ahead with its next move, likely appointing its own slate of directors, a move that it has until March 14 to make.

XemiComputers has just presented a new software product named Personal Lunar Organizer that works as a calendar with standard options for maintaining appointments and includes a special feature that calculates and shows moon phases. For those who believe in importance of moon phases for everyday life, or just like to know which moon phase it is today, they should consider this Windows program that also works as a full-blown organizer.

On Monday, one of Harvard University’s Web sites appeared to have been hacked, with its contents appearing on the BitTorrent file-sharing network.

A compressed 125MB file claiming to be the database for the Web site of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is available via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer to peer) network. The file is listed on The Pirate Bay, a Web site that indexes torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content from other users on BitTorrent.

A recent IDC study projected a sixfold growth in worldwide information between 2006 and 2010, from 161 exabytes in 2006 to more than 988 exabytes in 2010. All of this data requires storage, and enterprises are struggling to find ways to keep their data organized, well-managed and easily retrievable.

It’s never easy to come up with a definitive list of IT professionals with the most influence on the way we secure desktops, networks and mobile devices. And limiting the list to 15 hackers is a near-impossible task, but, in Ryan Naraine’s mind, these are the folks who stand out today as stirring the imagination and forcing us to rethink our approach to security in an always-on world.