AccuWeather.com announced the launch of its new RSS Center, featuring syndicated feeds for current conditions, weather forecasts, news and entertainment, and some of the most authoritative weather blogs available on the Web.

The new center is a one-stop destination for the AccuWeather.com weather and news content upon which millions of users have come to depend. Viewable through the most popular RSS readers or Web pages, including Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and AOL homepage, the feeds dynamically update, offering headlines and clickable summaries every time news, blog, or forecast items are changed or added.

Microsoft added another component to its toolbox of free testing software designed to make it easier for developers to create software compatible with the upcoming Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft released a beta version of what it says is a "highly automated" tool for determining whether third-party software meets the criteria for its Works with Windows Server 2008 program.

The tool can be used by software developers and by systems administrators who need to test the applications their companies run for compatibility with Windows Server 2008.

Although Microsoft Relevant Products/Services is at least 18 months away from releasing its Windows server Relevant Products/Services virtualization tool, code-named Viridian, Redmond released software Relevant Products/Services that does what market-leader VMware Relevant Products/Services’s apps cannot.

Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager software, available to demo at microsoft.com/scvmm, allows system managers to view and manage physical and virtual server assets simultaneously. Not coincidently, the release of the software occurred just ahead of VMware’s VMworld technology show in San Francisco.

September’s batch of Microsoft security patches was trimmed as Microsoft announced that a planned update to its SharePoint collaboration software would not be released this month.

The update was to fix an elevation of privilege flaw, which had been rated "important" by Microsoft. This type of flaw can be used to give attackers access to Windows resources that would otherwise be blocked off.

Microsoft, which declined to comment further on the matter, did not say when–or if–it would patch the bug. The flaw affects Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on Windows Server 2003 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Microsoft is planning to release five security bulletins on September’s Patch Tuesday.

While only one–a vulnerability in Windows–is deemed critical, three of the advisories address vulnerabilities that can lead to system takeover: the Windows flaw, flaws in MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, and holes in Visual Studio. The IM client vulnerability in particular should be given priority, experts say.

First, there were the Seven Wonders of the World. Then there was a New Seven Wonders list, voted on Internet-style. What are the seven wonders of the IT world? Here’s a look at seven of the biggest, most extreme and most unusual computers and projects.

As part of an update to its college information and application site, Microsoft announced, via its JobsBlog, that it has created "an AWESOME interactive site to go along with it" titled "Hey Genius."

Using terms like "hip," "hidden gems" and "cool," not once but twice, the site unabashedly aspires to get Microsoft in with the cool kids, perhaps the ones it fears are leaving it for the Apples and the Web 2.0 startups of the world.

Microsoft is trying to simplify its complex volume licensing programs and the customer agreements that fall under them.

As part of that initiative, the Redmond, Wash., software maker has slashed the number of price points and product SKUs in the different programs, and updated the language and the content flow in each agreement to give consistency across all volume licensing contracts.

This is it. This is our final article on the White House email controversy (barring any new news from Washington, of course). It seems only fitting then, that we began our series with the question "Where have all the emails gone?" and we end this series with the questions that, in the main, remain to be answered.

Read this OutlookPower article.

The defeat of Microsoft Relevant Products/Services’s Open XML proposal before the International Standards Organization is more than a small hiccup in the software Relevant Products/Services giant’s plans to make its document file format a global standard, some analysts now say.

"I think it’s a significant setback and that Microsoft will have to work on the specification itself in order to clear up what some people are saying are its inconsistencies," said research director Jim Murphy at AMR Research. The comments that accompanied the negative votes against Microsoft’s proposal will be discussed next February at an ISO ballot resolution meeting to be held in Geneva, Switzerland.