It may seem that our story of the controversy over White House email is unique to the George W. Bush White House. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, controversy over how the White House uses email dates back almost as far as email’s very existence. In this fascinating (and slightly disturbing) article, we take you through White House email and the White House’s attempts to hide email records for the past 25 years.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Microsoft declined to comment Friday on post-Vista plans by releasing a comment–a move bloggers attributed to buzz about a list of most-asked-for features to Vista’s successor. The list was yanked from a Microsoft forum earlier this week.

The company’s statement, attributed to Kevin Kutz, director of the Windows client team, was among the shortest on record from the company.

"The launch of Windows Vista was an incredibly exciting moment for our customers and partners around the world, and the company is focused on the value Windows Vista will bring to people today," Kutz said. "We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we’re working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates."

Although Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is part of a February 2008 multiproduct launch, the company intends to ship it by the end of 2007, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog.

The company earlier this week announced that a launch event on February 27, 2008, would feature Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. This revelation, made at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, came after Microsoft had said Visual Studio 2008 was targeted to ship later this year. But Microsoft is still anticipating a 2007 release, Somasegar said.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the mega OS release has been greatly exaggerated, Microsoft’s COO said this week.

In a part-speech, part-presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, COO Kevin Turner echoed comments made earlier this year by CEO Steve Ballmer that Windows Vista is not the last major update of the company’s client operating system. Tuesday, as Turner dubbed Vista and the simultaneously-unveiled Office 2007 "huge, big-dog releases," he also promised more would come.

Turner’s assertions parroted those made by Ballmer Jan. 29, just before Vista and Office 2007 went to retail. In New York on the launch eve, Ballmer said Microsoft had "plenty more where that came from," referring to Vista and its follow-on. At the time, speculation had mounted over whether Microsoft would, or even could, again mount a Vista-sized effort, in part because Ballmer himself had sworn that the company would never again take five years to craft a new OS.

Fed up with U.S. immigration hurdles, Microsoft announced July 5 plans to open a software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia, that it hopes will "be home to software developers from around the world."

Employing as many as 900 workers within a couple years, the facility, to be called the Microsoft Canada Development Centre, is slated to open in the fall of 2007, though the company said it has not yet determined who will staff the facility.

Analysts were quick to suggest that the move may signal the start of a new hiring trend, in which other technology companies, frustrated with the difficulty of bringing skilled foreign workers to the United States to staff their companies, will follow in Microsoft’s footsteps to Canada, where it is easier for foreign nationals to obtain work credentials.

There’s still no consensus regarding whether the zero-day vulnerability that security researcher Thor Larholm found is on Internet Explorer or on Firefox. But more to the point, there is a way to block the exploit, which otherwise could lead to remote system hijacking. According to Microsoft Security Program Manager Jesper Johansson, blocking the exploit boils down to deleting Firefox protocol handlers.

One way to kill the protocol handlers on multiple machines is to group policy script and SMS packages, he said. Rolling the fix out to thousands of machines can be done by creating a batch file deployed as a startup script. Larholm initially blamed the vulnerability on an input validation flaw in Internet Explorer that allows users to specify arbitrary arguments to the process responsible for handling URL protocols. It’s the same type of input validation vulnerability that Larholm discovered in the Safari 3 beta, he said.

Sonasoft announced the availability of its new version of SonaSafe solution which provides unique disaster recovery and high availability features for protecting Exchange 2007 server. Sonasoft is one of the few companies providing enhanced data protection support for Exchange 2007 server.

Sonasoft provides a high-availability solution, protecting data from hardware/software failures and human errors. SonaSafe application maintains the redundant, standby server by continually updating the data with that retrieved from the primary system. The standby system can take over instantly in the event of primary system failure. The standby system can be on-site, or located at a remote site for protection against natural or man-made disasters.

Sonasoft offers several advanced backup/recovery and replication features for Exchange 2007. Some of the features include intelligent backup and restore functionality, dynamic consolidated mailbox backup capability, replication functionality that is fully integrated with the backup, ability to replicate just one mailbox to test disaster recovery preparedness and many more interesting features.

Three IT giants–Cisco Systems, EMC, and Microsoft–have formed an alliance to create a new common IT architecture for sharing and protecting sensitive government or business information, representatives from all three companies told eWEEK July 9.

The alliance was born of a shared project with the Department of Defense, during which the companies designed and engineered the so-called SISA (Secure Information Sharing Architecture), a new security-enhanced, end-to-end information-sharing design framework. The nature of the DOD project was not revealed.

Symantec released security updates for AntiVirus Corporate Edition and Backup Exec, fixing flaws attackers could exploit to gain extra user privileges, cause a denial of service or possibly launch malicious code.

The antivirus giant said in its SYM07-017 advisory that the first flaw is in the Real-Time scanner component of Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition, which provides notification and logging services for the product.

Microsoft released a beta version of its next-generation Windows Live OneCare 2.0 desktop security and management package on July 11, touting a number of improvements made to the product, including the ability to monitor multiple PCs on a local network.

Available for free download on the company’s Web site, the combined software and service offering–which is aimed specifically at consumers and small businesses–also adds new functionality for backing-up data and protecting against malware attacks.