After months of searching, Microsoft announced on June 30 that it has named a new leader for the Microsoft Business Solutions group.

Microsoft hopes that filling the position will provide direction for the business applications group, which has been struggling to find an identity within Microsoft and to establish its presence in the ERP (enterprise resource planning) market.

Kirill Tatarinov, a Russian native and Microsoft employee for the last five years, will lead the MBS team. MBS, which develops four separate ERP suites as well as an on-premise and soon-to-be-released on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) suite, was initially headed by Doug Burgum.

Microsoft has released nine updates for Windows Vista that range from fixing time zone issues to addressing problems in its dictionary.

Hackers are now circulating fraudulent email claiming to be patch updates from Microsoft, according to security companies and the SANS Internet Storm Center. The deceptive email urges users to go to a fake URL where they can download an "update," which is actually a Trojan Horse that could infiltrate their networks.

The center said it has received several recent reports of fake Microsoft email addressed to specific individuals at the companies where they work. The emails claim that the recipients have been identified as users of Microsoft Genuine Software and that Outlook needs to be patched, according to the center.

Standards body Ecma International has formed a technical committee to develop a standard built on Microsoft’s XML Paper Specification, a rival file format to Adobe Systems’ Portable Document Format.

According to Ecma’s Web site, the goal of the TC46-XPS Technical Committee is to create "a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format and XML-based page description language which is consistent with existing implementations of the format called the XML Paper Specification."

XPS is one of many file formats natively supported in Microsoft’s Office 2007 productivity suite and was developed internally by the company. Currently, Microsoft has the only implementation of XPS. Microsoft had planned to include PDF–used widely as a de facto document standard for years but only submitted to a standards body earlier this year by Adobe–as a native file format as well, but Adobe put the kibosh on that plan. Microsoft does offer PDF as an add-on file format for Office.

Microsoft, as part of its new Windows Live set of hosted services, is now beta testing the concept of free data storage "in the cloud" for consumers.

If all goes well with the 5,000 beta testers now trying it out, Windows users at large could be receiving the invite to sign up free of charge by this fall.

Windows Live Folders, a hosted system for storage of personal files and accessing and sharing files publicly with access controls for all contacts, will give users 500MB of online storage at no charge. The maximum file size supported will be 50MB.

Cyber-thieves have set their sights on C-level executives with sophisticated social-engineering techniques designed to steal data, according to security researchers at MessageLabs.

In its monthly report, MessageLabs recorded a sudden spike in the number of targeted attacks June 26, intercepting some 500 attacks that used emails with Microsoft Word document attachments containing malicious code.

The surge, while unusual in its magnitude, follows an increase in the number of targeted attacks MessageLabs researchers have seen during the past few years, said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst for MessageLabs, in Gloucester, England.

Email and Internet content security provider Marshal announced that "pump-and-dump"spam has dropped significantly, though not all security vendors agree.

Marshal researchers say stock spam now represents five percent of all spam as compared with 50 percent in February. During the past quarter, the amount of pump-and-dump spam, a type of financial fraud involving the artificial inflation of a stock’s price so it can be sold at a higher value, has averaged around 30 percent of all spam messages.

However, in the past four weeks, the Marshal Threat Research and Content Engineering team saw the volume of stock spam drop to 5.1 percent, the lowest point it has seen in 10 months.

Microsoft is encouraging ISVs to develop applications for Office 2007 in a strategy that the company said could ease the burden on IT managers. But making it easier for users to access apps might actually create its own set of problems.

Microsoft and independent software vendors are working together to develop Office Business Applications, or OBAs, in such areas as ERP, CRM and SCM. If ISVs develop these applications on the Office 2007 platform, Microsoft said that IT shops can take less of an administration role while giving users easier access to such applications.

Microsoft has just released an update to Exchange 2007 that should fix issues that could have prevented Apple’s new iPhone from receiving mail from Exchange Server 2007.

The software maker released June 28 the third update to Exchange Server 2007, known as Rollup 3, which addresses many of the issues customers have been experiencing with Apple Mac Mail, just ahead of the release of Apple’s iPhone on June 29.

The update is expected to address the many issues Exchange 2007 users have been having, including with Mac Mail and the fact that when they access their mailboxes on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 server, certain IMAP clients cannot open the bodies of the email messages, which triggers an error message.

This fix is important as the iPhone will work with Exchange Server via IMAP4, Keith McCall, chief technology officer of Azaleos and a former Exchange executive, told eWEEK.

Five months after its introduction, Microsoft is discontinuing a program that offered some Windows Vista purchasers the ability to buy additional copies of the operating system at a substantial discount.

Since Windows Vista went on sale to consumers at the end of January, U.S. and Canadian buyers of Vista Ultimate have had the option of buying up to two additional copies of Vista–albeit the Home Premium version–for an additional $50 apiece. The company had said it would re-evaluate the "Windows Vista Family Discount" after June 30.

In a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Microsoft product manager Nick White said the program would "sunset" as of 11:59 p.m. PDT on June 30.