Calling Vista’s November 2006 business launch more of a "message to organizations that they could start official testing" than the beginning of a time in which the operating system would appear on millions of enterprise machines, a report released Jan. 30 by Gartner offers IT professionals advice on planning and deploying Vista. Now that the grace period is over and enterprises will be putting Vista to the real test, as some users pressure for upgrades, Gartner expects employees to bring it in through the back door in a trend they call "consumerization." Gartner notes that this is the primary way Windows 95 initially entered the enterprise and that Microsoft hopes this will continue for the current release.

In an interview after he resumed the role of CEO at the company he founded, Michael Dell said he was excited about taking charge, and that we should expect to see a lot of changes in the company in the "months and quarters" ahead. While Dell didn’t directly criticize former CEO Kevin Rollins, he did say "we have a lot of hidden assets in the company that have not been coming out." He also said "Dell can execute better than it has recently." This week, the company announced it would not meet analysts’ targets for its fiscal fourth quarter.

Michael Dell is CEO again of his namesake company. Kevin Rollins is out. Why? The company is going to have another earnings miss. The company just said in a statement:

"The Board believes that Michael’s vision and leadership are critical to building Dell’s leadership in the technology industry for the long term," said Samuel A. Nunn, presiding director of Dell’s Board. "There is no better person in the world to run Dell at this time than the man who created the Direct Model and who has built this company over the last 23 years."

Microsoft is trying to dampen criticism by explaining its controversial decision to unify the rendering and editing engines in Outlook 2007 and use only the Word 2007 engine, even though there are some HTML and Cascading Style Sheet attributes that the engine does not currently support. The move is a significant change from previous versions of Outlook, which actually used two rendering engines: Internet Explorer’s engine was used for reading content, while Word was used for editing content when a user was composing messages.

The Coast Guard searched the waters off Northern California on Wednesday for an award-winning computer scientist missing since a weekend sailing trip to scatter his mother’s ashes at sea. A cargo plane, a helicopter and six patrol boats have been scouring the Pacific since Monday for Jim Gray, who helped develop the technology behind popular computer mapping programs like Google Earth. Gray, founder and manager of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, won the A.M. Turing Award — the "Nobel Prize of computer science" — in 1998 for research that paved the way for automatic teller machines, computerized airline reservations and online shopping.

Microsoft has been touting the benefits of its design tools for a couple of years, but examples of those are just beginning to emerge with the advent of the company’s Expression suite of design tools. At the Jan. 30 event dubbed ExpressionSession07, Microsoft showed off the intimate details of its Expression tools to an invite-only audience of design professionals. The New York event was the third of three, with the other two occurring in San Francisco and Chicago earlier in January.

It’s not easy being Windows Vista. Not only do Microsoft partners report that business demand is next to nil, but managed services providers also are saying they want their customers to wait. Too many unanswered questions remain about hardware requirements, security implications and compatibility with existing business applications, MSPs say. And since the role of MSPs is largely preventive, they are urging caution.

Publisher John Wiley & Sons announced the February 5th release of Microsoft Office Word 2007, the first of six official academic course texts and e-learning tools for Microsoft programs it is developing in partnership with Microsoft Learning. The titles supply professors with complete course solutions to help them prepare for and deliver first-rate courses on Microsoft technology, and help students master the critical technological skills they need for the high-tech workplace.

Microsoft’s decision to incorporate Tablet PC features and functionality into the Windows Vista operating system is one that eWEEK Labs believes will help to convert Tablet PC skeptics. eWEEK Labs installed the operating system on two Tablet PCs–Lenovo’s ThinkPad X60 Tablet and Fujitsu’s LifeBook T4215–and found that Microsoft has delivered a much more practical and smoother tablet experience in Vista.

AccuWeather.com announced the launch of a new weather toolbar developed specifically for users of Internet Explorer