Microsoft executives said they are working hard to finish up its Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office Project 2007, an update that some users have been waiting for before deploying the most recent version of the software.

SP1 will update Project Professional 2007, Project Server 2007 and Project Portfolio Server 2007, said Keshav Puttaswamy, group program manager at Microsoft, speaking during the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle on Monday.

It will primarily fix bugs and improve stability and performance, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. It will also enhance some cache features, he said.

The House of Representatives approved legislation on Tuesday extending a moratorium on state Internet access taxes for seven years, sending the bill to the president to sign into law. The state tax ban has been in place since 1998 and is scheduled to expire on November 1.

Internet service providers say the price of Internet access could rise by as much as 17 percent if the moratorium on state taxes was allowed to expire.

The House approved by 402-0 the bill, which includes a longer moratorium extension than the four-year extension the chamber earlier endorsed. The latest version of the House legislation is identical to that already approved by the Senate, so the bill next goes to President George W. Bush, who is expected to sign it into law.

Lucid8 announced the availability of the new version 1.1 of its highly-successful DigiScope. DigiScope is a simple yet powerful tool that provides advanced e-Discovery, Restore, Export and Analysis capabilities.

DigiScope’s user interface has been enhanced to look and work like Microsoft’s Outlook product. This enables users to quickly become productive in DigiScope without learning an entirely new interface. New features include Enterprise-level views of online and offline stores, Attachment Previews, Message Previews, and simple drag-and-drop operations that make this version even easier to use than DigiScope 1.0. The new DigiScope 1.1 also has tighter integration with DigiVault 1.65, Lucid8’s continuous data protection product, to allow seamless retrieval of up-to-the-moment data for e-Discovery or Recovery actions.

Lucid8 will be demonstrating DigiScope 1.1 at Microsoft Exchange Connections, November 5-8, 2007 at the Mandalay Bay Resort Conference Center, Las Vegas, NV.

Privacy Networks, the email solutions company, announced they have made their PrivacyVault solution available for free evaluation on secure hosted systems. The hosted evaluation solution allows customers to evaluate PrivacyVault without deploying additional hardware and resources on site. Upon completion of the hosted evaluation, the customer has the choice of deployment of a PrivacyVault solution on an appliance, a hosted service or as standalone software. The hallmark elements of Privacy Networks, including simple implementation, compliance readiness, scalability and affordability are all evidenced in the new service that allows customers to quickly evaluate the fit into their business or organization.

OrdinarySoft has released a new version of Vista Start Menu, an alternative to the standard Windows Start Menu. It takes the "quick start" concept to the next level by taking full advantage of users’ visual memory. The new version features Instant Search which allows searching the PC as fast and easy as searching the Web.

Instant search feature lets users quickly find the exact file or email message they need and organize the content the way they like. The search results are displayed in a clear way, so you will not have to spend more time on "searching the search." You will get the results at once and increase your productivity in times.

Vista Start Menu enables Windows Vista users to instantly find documents, media files, email messages and attachments, and many other file types the way they are used to. Users can quickly scan through results and open the items right from the start menu. New Instant Search feature is an essential addition to other powerful features in Vista Start Menu.

Microsoft has hired the creator of the SubSonic tool set and plans to use SubSonic as a key part of an upcoming platform. Rob Conery founded the open-source SubSonic project, which helps a Web site build itself, according to SubSonic’s Web site. Conery blogged about the hire Oct. 26, with a host of observers chiming in to respond about the news.

Microsoft is at work on a project to enable everyday developers to build Web applications, just as easily as folks have built Visual Basic applications over the years. The project to enable this is called Volta and it is headed up by Erik Meijer, a Microsoft architect in the company’s SQL Server group. Meijer gave a demonstration of Volta at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems and Applications) on Oct. 23.

With the release of a new product and a major acquisition under his belt, Mike Angiulo, general manager for Microsoft Office Project, will give the opening keynote at its first user conference in some eighteen months here Oct. 29. The address will concentrate on the release earlier this year of Office Project 2007 and an update on the acquisition of UMT, Angiulo told eWEEK ahead of his keynote.

An example of the new kind of user for the product is Microsoft’s own human resources department, which was the first user of the Portfolio Server technology acquired the under the UMT deal. Microsoft’s HR department is running the server software to track the strategic priorities of its investments across the company, along with candidates for the different kinds of programs and the costs, risks and potential benefits associated with these, he said.

If you’re interested in exporting data from Outlook, the normal Outlook export functionality might not do it. In this helpful article, we highlight some great (and free) resources that’ll really help you get the job done.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Microsoft has released rollup number five containing fixes for Exchange Server 2007. It resolves two minor issues and includes the previous four updates.

The latest rollup makes sure that email received will have the "at" symbol properly displayed in the recipient’s email address instead of the characters %40. The other fix is for meeting invitations sent by Lotus Notes users, which takes any non-English characters contained in the meeting location and replaces them with question marks.

There are only two new fixes in this rollup, compared with 10 and 13 in prior ones. All previous interim updates for Exchange Server 2007 must be uninstalled before installing rollup five, Microsoft said.