Microsoft said on Thursday it agreed to acquire European mobile phone advertising company ScreenTonic to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing business for placing ads on mobile phones.

Microsoft did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Paris-based ScreenTonic is one of the first companies in Europe to develop a platform to manage and place ads on the mobile Internet.

In a worldwide kickoff event that involved 50,000 people, Microsoft launched the client piece of its aggressive client-server-edge enterprise security software push, which the company branded as its Forefront line at the Boston TechEd show in June 2006.

In a keynote address to business customers and partners in Los Angeles, Microsoft Senior Vice President Bob Muglia announced the launch of two new products–Forefront Client Security and Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007.

Forefront Client Security is designed to provide anti-malware protection for business desktops, laptops and server operating systems. It integrates with Microsoft’s System Center line of system management technologies, Active Directory and other Microsoft products.

System Center Essentials 2007 is the management piece of the puzzle. The product provides a unified console, designed to simplify tasks such as managing clients, servers, hardware, software and IT services.

Microsoft, first and foremost, is a software company. Or is it? At this week’s Mix ’07, the final keynote from Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, made no bones about Microsoft’s advertising ambitions. Bach spent much of his 45-minute address detailing how advertising is becoming more of a central component to many of Microsoft’s businesses, including gaming, mobile phones and video/music delivery.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, is not one to take extreme views or make outlandish claims. But he is adamantly sure of one thing: a combination of software and online services is the future.

And so far, Ozzie’s contention that the industry is going through a disruptive shift from software to services is bearing out.

IBM introduced a storage software management package for OEM distribution that provides backup and restore capabilities for Microsoft SharePoint environments.

SharePoint is a Web-based workplace for online collaboration, which provides sharing of business data and support of Microsoft Office documents. Deployments are in the tens of millions worldwide, a company spokesperson said.

The new Tivoli Storage Manager for SharePoint, IBM’s enterprise data protection software developed with OEM partner AvePoint, aims to reduce the risks of data loss, help users protect the integrity of data and comply with new data-retention requirements.

Next week’s Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft will include fixes for a wide range of "critical" vulnerabilities in the Windows, Office and Exchange product lines, the software giant announced.

As part of its advance notice mechanism, Microsoft said a total of 7 bulletins will be released on May 8, 2007. Here are the barebones details.

ShareMethods, a leading provider of on-demand sales and marketing document management, today announced the immediate availability of ShareDrive OnDemand. ShareDrive OnDemand, built on webDAV industry standard supported by IBM, Adobe, Microsoft, and Oracle, addresses key limitations of Office 2.0 application services, allowing ShareMethods subscribers to access their documents on their desktop, based on open industry standards. One of the biggest limitations cited with the emergence of Office 2.0 online office applications, is the requirement to work solely in a web browser and to be connected to a live network. ShareDrive OnDemand addresses a number of these limitations and provides a variety of powerful capabilities for offline work, access in traditional desktop applications, and for desktop integration.

In big business, stealing customers for an incremental increase in market share against competitors happens all the time; after all, when there aren’t new customers to be had, you can only attract existing ones. Times are rough for some antispyware vendors now that the market includes big-name vendors CA, McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm–all of them providing antispyware solutions within their antivirus products or Internet security suites. And with Microsoft bundling its Windows Defender product free within Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2, pure-play antispyware vendors such as PCTools, Sunbelt, and Webroot are all scrambling for a bigger piece of the pie, and some of that scrambling has turned downright nasty.

You may already know that "deleting" a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data? No? Then read on.

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal email messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.