As Microsoft prepares to roll out its Windows Live OneCare security product, it is offering some people the $49.95-a-year service for free. On Tuesday, Microsoft sent email invitations to a select number of people who have been testing OneCare, asking them to join a "perpetual beta." These people get to use the service at no cost and will have early access to new features, said Brooke Richardson, a lead product manager at Microsoft.

Recosoft Corporation, developer of PDF file conversion tools and cross platform Macintosh and Windows file format conversion solutions, has started shipping PDF2Office Personal v3.0 and PDF2Office Standard v3.0. PDF2Office Personal v3.0 represents a major upgrade to PDF2Office Personal v2.0–the popular PDF to Word conversion tool. Additionally, Recosoft has expanded the PDF2Office product family by introducing PDF2Office Standard v3.0 a new tool for directly opening PDF files in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, providing an effective low-cost solution for PDF to PowerPoint and Microsoft Word conversions and offering enhanced integration with the Office product line.

Windows Genuine Advantage has worked so well that Microsoft is planning to introduce a version of the anti-piracy authentication program targeted at its Office suite. Microsoft officials said on April 24 that the company is commencing this week a pilot of Office Genuine Advantage, a program that will operate almost identically to WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage). Microsoft is piloting OGA in seven languages, initially: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Spanish.

Exchange 2003 Small Business users have a fantastic opportunity to combat spam. WinDeveloper announced the availability of IMF Tune Small Business version at rock bottom prices. The opportunity to unleash the full Microsoft Intelligent Message Filter power was never this good. The new Small Business licensing extends the already established IMF Tune licensing options. This is available to organizations with up to thirty email users and a single Microsoft Exchange Server.

Microsoft has provided some of its current business testers of Windows Vista with a slightly updated beta version. On Saturday, the computer maker provided some of its Technology Adoption Customer partners and technical beta users with Build 5365. The new code, which Microsoft is calling an "External Developer Workstation," does not add any major new features, but does add some performance improvements and device support, Microsoft said Monday.

Microsoft is releasing a new test version of Internet Explorer, the market-leading Web browser that is facing competition from smaller players. The new beta, available Tuesday for free download to English-languages customers, includes fixes for problems that were causing Internet Explorer 7 to stop working, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager in charge of Internet Explorer development. With the previous test version, Hachamovitch said the most common problems reported involved banking and news sites, in part because of security changes.

Microsoft told a special 13-judge court on Monday the European Commission made fundamental errors in deciding that the company illegally tied Windows Media Player to its near-monopoly operating system. "That theory is flawed at every step," Microsoft lawyer Jean-Francois Bellis told Europe’s second-highest court, the Court of First Instance, in opening remarks during the software giant’s challenge to the landmark 2004 decision.

ReSoft announced the release of a white paper exploring today’s enterprise challenges in E-discovery and why today’s email archiving solutions alone are unable to meet an organization’s E-discovery Response Service Level. The paper describes how the Clearwell Email Intelligence Platform, for which ReSoft is an authorized reseller, can transform the way enterprises discover, organize and analyze the information across their corporate email systems without disrupting production operations.

The Los Angeles Times suspended one of its blogs after discovering that the author used an alias to post material at Web sites operated by the Times and others, which is a breach of the Times’ ethical policies. The blog in question is Golden State, which is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. The L.A. Times explained in a "Notice from the Editor" posted April 20 that Hiltzik admitted to using an alias, but wasn’t more specific. "The Times is investigating the postings," the editor’s note said.

Microsoft told a European Union court Monday that regulators had completely misunderstood thriving competition in the software market in issuing a landmark antitrust ruling against the giant U.S. company. But an internal Microsoft memo presented by a coalition of critical companies suggested founder Bill Gates was told that a strategy used to crush the rival Netscape browser could also take down the leader in streaming media, RealNetworks’ RealPlayer. The June 5, 1997, memo from Microsoft executive Jim Durkin recalled a meeting with Gates and other top executives concerning the threat of RealNetworks, which had the biggest market share for software used to listen to the radio and watch TV over the Web.