With Microsoft’s Vista and Office 2007 released to manufacturing, the software giant is preparing to adapt the products for the Web-dominated era, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Wednesday. Ozzie spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit, where he said the company overall is making a transition to designing software that takes advantage of the PC–as it has historically done–as well as online services.

Yahoo is planning to embed instant messaging into its Web-based email program within the next few months so that people can have live chats in Yahoo Mail, even if they don’t have an instant-messaging application installed, a Yahoo executive announced on Thursday. Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications, communities and front doors at Yahoo, gave a technology preview at the Web 2.0 Summit here of a new feature planned for Yahoo Mail that seamlessly integrates instant messaging.

Novell has announced the release of Mono version 1.2, a new version of the Mono project to create an implementation of the Microsoft .Net Framework for open source. Mono 1.2 enhances the open-source effort and is a major step toward compatibility with the .Net Framework 2.0, Novell officials said. Novell announced the new version on Nov. 9 at the Microsoft TechEd Developers conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Microsoft on Tuesday plans to issue six security bulletins, including at least one with a fix for a security vulnerability that is actively being used in cyberattacks. As part of its monthly patching cycle, Microsoft will release a bulletin with a "critical" fix for a security hole in its XML Core Services software, the company said in a note on its Web site Thursday. The vulnerability is a so-called zero-day flaw that’s already being exploited for attacks.

BonaVista Systems announced its debut release of MicroCharts. This intuitive add-in for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services allows users to quickly generate data-rich tables and graphs as small as the size of words. This clear and simple presentation helps business professionals quickly uncover positive negative and other rising trends in their data so that they can better understand their business and ultimately make wiser decisions.

Interactive Edge announced the launch of a beta program for its new data extraction and conversion product, DataDefractor. DataDefractor is a turnkey solution designed for use by corporate IT professionals tasked with building Business Intelligence (BI) and data management solutions with SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS). It addresses the common problem faced when attempting to make the wealth of spreadsheet data captured in mission-critical semi-structured company reports saved in a variety of formats including Excel Worksheets, CSV files and text flat files available and usable to the SSIS ETL platform. DataDefractor extracts, dimensionalizes and transforms fact data and dimensional metadata captured in these reports, normalizes it and pumps it into the SSIS pipeline making it available for further SSIS processing.

Has a software application "saved your life?" Has technology made you more productive or helped you to become a hero in your company? Basex, the technology analyst firm in the knowledge worker marketplace, wants to know, and is sponsoring The Office Worker Challenge to find out. The online contest, judged by Basex analysts, seeks the best examples of how office workers have adapted technology in creative ways. Entrants are encouraged to share success stories of how they were able to push the technology envelope, making an individual or company more successful, productive, agile and/or profitable. The three top submissions will win a brand new Palm Treo 680, Palm’s hip new quad-band smartphone. The best stories will be included in an upcoming book on office productivity; entrants can request a complimentary executive summary of the book.

On the heels of its July 2006 acquisition of Mark Russinovich’s Winternals Software, Microsoft has replaced the popular Regmon and Filemon utilities with a single tool offering advanced capabilities for real-time monitoring of registry and process thread activity. The release of the new utility, called Process Monitor coincides with the relaunch of the Sysinternals portal as the Windows Sysinternals TechCenter on Microsoft TechNet.

In a sign that quality control problems at Google persist, the Google Video team sent an email to about 50,000 recipients yesterday that may have contained a virus. The email was sent to a discussion list focused on its Google Video blog.

Microsoft has agreed to pay Universal Music Group a fee for each new Zune digital music player it sells when the iPod rival launches next week, the companies said on Thursday. The groundbreaking deal could redefine the digital music business pioneered by Apple Computer. Rivals including cell phone makers eventually could pay for hardware sales as well as for the music itself, Universal said.