The head of Microsoft’s open-source business has offered to help get Firefox to work with Windows Vista, but it remains to be seen whether Mozilla and the open-source community will respond positively. Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft’s open-source software lab, posted an open invitation for them to work with the software giant on a Mozilla development discussion group mailing list Monday. "I’m writing to see if you are open to some 1:1 support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird to run on Vista," Ramji wrote. Mozilla oversees the development of the open-source Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client.

Microsoft is pouring cold water on a warning from anti-virus vendor Trend Micro that a new PowerPoint zero-day attack is under way. The Trend Micro warning, first issued Aug. 19, said that a specially crafted ".ppt" file was being used to exploit an undocumented PowerPoint vulnerability. The Japanese anti-virus company said it received a sample of the file Aug. 17, less than two weeks after Microsoft shipped a security update to fix a PowerPoint flaw.

Symantec introduced an updated version of its legal discovery suite on Aug. 21, promising new features that further streamline companies’ abilities to meet information reporting demands spurred by lawsuits and other mandates. Dubbed Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator 6.0, the product is meant to integrate with the data storage and lifecycle management applications sold under the company’s Veritas product line. The package is designed specifically to help companies address the process of retaining, tracking down and turning over electronic documents demanded during the discovery process of litigation.

Centeris’ Likewise Management Suite makes it easy for Windows network administrators to configure and monitor most Linux systems, including integrating Linux systems into Microsoft Active Directory. Version 2.0 of the Likewise Management Suite, which was released on Aug. 8 for $349 per managed server, provides tools for managing firewalls, SSH console connections, a dashboard with system status information, a new interface for managing users and groups, and support for direct editing of network settings. IT administrators at small to medium-sized organizations who want to integrate Linux-based servers into an existing Windows network will probably benefit the most from Likewise.

Years ago, Microsoft created a multi-tier pricing structure for Windows that emphasized pre-installing its software on new PCs. But their appears to be a startling gap between what a pre-installed copy of Windows appears to be worth and what Microsoft charges when it puts the same software in a retail box.

New email campaign automation software lets IT professionals distribute email marketing processing among three servers, boosting system performance by a factor of 10 over previous configurations. Campaign Enterprise Array from Arial Software lets administrators assign different email functions to each server within a network. This system "array" can easily handle any size and scale of email campaign while maintaining optimum email performance metrics. Three-server email systems using Campaign Enterprise Array can manage unique campaigns of over 100 million personalized emails, depending on hardware. Other testing has timed email delivery speeds between 300,000 and 400,000 personalized emails per hour, using the software "out-of-the box."

Two AOL employees were fired and its chief technology officer has left the company following a privacy breach in which the Internet search terms of more than 650,000 subscribers were publicly released. The researcher who released the data and that employee’s direct supervisor were fired, said one person familiar with the company’s decisions. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because release of personnel information was not authorized, would not say whether Govern’s departure was voluntary. AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., admitted earlier this month that it had made a mistake in releasing three months’ worth of search terms.

This week, rather than provide one long answer to a particularly vexing Outlook problem, we’ve decided to gather up a few recent letters to the editor and present them for your reading pleasure.

Read this OutlookPower article.

LearnWindows2003.com, a Web site devoted to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 tutorials, has just made several of its video tutorials for Windows 2003 developers and systems administrators available for free. LearnWindows2003.com features video training recorded by an expert instructor and contains an additional 25 hours worth of downloadable training videos for subscribers.

Document archiving specialist, Techne-Comm has launched MailS@fe, the first software indexing and archiving application to fully integrate into MS Outlook. MailS@fe enables users to index and archive emails to a central SQL server database providing quick and easy access to emails for team based users in projects, groups and departments. Unlike other email archiving solutions on the market, with MailS@fe there is no need to launch a separate application as all of the functionality lies within Outlook and is accessed via a four button toolbar.