Microsoft is readying two tools to help hardware makers create more stable and secure Windows drivers, which should help reduce the number of crashes. The tools, PreFast for Drivers and Static Driver Verifier, are source code analysis tools that find common flaws in driver source code, so they can be fixed. Second beta versions were released at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference alongside new trials of Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn."

Bootstrap Software announced the availability of PoliteMail. PoliteMail adds new email marketing capabilities to Outlook, making it simple to create, mail merge and send promotional and commercial messages, opt-in email newsletters, bulk email promotions, direct email announcements, e-marketing campaigns or any other email communications–and then see the results instantly. PoliteMail provides automatic email tracking and shows you when recipients open, reply to or forward your email, as well as when they click your links or open your attachments. PoliteMail automatically handles undeliverable messages and provides opt-out or "unsubscribe" compliance. Pricing starts at a penny per tracked message or an annual license for $495.

It’s a holiday weekend here in the U.S. We all know what that means: extra work doing family tech support. Mom and Dad, Grandma and Aunt Lucy have all saved up their dumbest and most annoying tech support problems, just waiting for you to arrive and fix them. But, in the spirit of the Memorial Day, we’ll take pity on all our readers who are in the trenches of the tech support war. For a short time, we’ll waive our usual site-license fee and sign up your company, group, school, or organization en mass to OutlookPower at no charge.

Read this OutlookPower article.

The OpenDocument Format has come under attack from Microsoft, which claims its Office Open XML format has significantly better performance. "The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory," Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft’s information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. "The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats, so we have made sure that customers won’t notice a big difference in performance."

After already announcing plans for an Ultimate edition of Windows Vista, Microsoft confirmed this week that it also plans an Ultimate edition of Office 2007. The new retail package, which was not part of the Office 2007 lineup announced back in February, will offer nearly all the components available to large businesses in one $679 product. Office Ultimate is similar to the enterprise edition that is available only to large businesses, and includes standards like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, along with Publisher, the OneNote note-taking software, the Groove collaboration suite, Access database and InfoPath forms software. Microsoft did not announce pricing for the enterprise edition, since it is only available for volume licensing customers.

Google and Dell have agreed to a first in a series of deals to preinstall Web and desktop search software on the PC maker’s computers, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Thursday. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas, Schmidt discussed details of a long-rumored deal between the No. 1 search engine and the No. 1 PC maker, which is a strike against Google rival Microsoft. Under the deal, millions of Dell PCs will be loaded with the Google toolbar for Web and PC search, along with a co-branded home page, before they’re shipped to consumers.

Microsoft has renewed its interest in mobile computing. The software giant, which earlier in 2006 introduced its Ultra-Mobile PC, formerly code-named Origami, has created a new mobile marketing group with rising executive Mika Krammer as its director, and is working to synchronize not only what it says about its two mobile operating systems–Windows and Windows Mobile–but also the way they work together. Mobility, whether in the form of notebook PCs or smart phones, represents a rapidly expanding market, so Microsoft is paying more attention to it and working to better integrate its various marketing efforts focused on the space.

Orb Networks announced the release of Orb VideoMail for users of Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook. For the first time, Orb VideoMail frees video-based communication through email from the constraints of file sizes and file formats and extends videomail’s reach to millions of mobile devices. Right from the email applications they use every day, users can express themselves with all the passion and precision that only video can provide. The Orb application running on the user’s always-connected PC streams the videomails that are authored within the Thunderbird or Outlook plugin on any PC and then securely transferred in the background from the plugin to the user’s Orb PC. The videomails stream to recipients in the right media formats, bitrates, and screen resolutions for the devices on which they open the videomails.

Use Microsoft Word in safe mode to protect against targeted zero-day attacks. That’s the advice from Microsoft’s security response team to counter known attacks against a serious code execution vulnerability in the widely used word processing program. In a pre-patch security advisory, Microsoft said the flaw can be exploited when a user opens a specially crafted Word file using a malformed object pointer. This corrupts system memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code.

Software piracy resulted in a loss of $34 billion worldwide in 2005, a $1.6 billion increase over 2004, according to a study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance. The study, conducted by information-technology research firm IDC, found that roughly one out of every three copies of personal computing software installed in 2005 was pirated. While the rate of piracy has fluctuated from country to country, globally it has remained steady since 2004.