Offshore outsourcing isn’t as gratifying as it used to be, according to a report released Tuesday by a consulting firm. DiamondCluster International’s annual study of information technology outsourcing found that the number of buyers satisfied with their "offshoring" providers has fallen from 79 percent to 62 percent. In addition, the number of buyers prematurely terminating an outsourcing relationship has doubled to 51 percent.

After several delays, Microsoft has delivered an overhaul of its corporate patching tool and the promised successor to its Windows Update service. In addition, the company set a date of mid-July for delivery of an add-on to Systems Management Server 2003 that lets large organizations inventory and install Microsoft updates. At that time, small and midsize businesses will get Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.0, which is a tool to check their systems to see if they are up to date on their Microsoft fixes.

A jury in U.S. federal court found that Microsoft infringed on a Guatemalan inventor’s 1994 patent on technology linking the company’s Access and Excel programs, and ordered the world’s largest software maker to pay $8.9 million in damages. A jury in the U.S. District Court of Central California told Microsoft to pay the award to Carlos Armando Amado for software that uses a single spreadsheet to link Excel, a spreadsheet and calculation program, with the Access database application.

Over the next two weeks, you may notice a difference in when and how much news gets posted. That’s because I’m taking a bit of a mini-vacation from the news. I’ll likely be posting something each day, just not as much as normal, and probably not at a time you’re used to.–James Booth, Senior Editor.

Microsoft will give away software upgrades that offer Outlook users access to wireless corporate email on mobile devices–a move designed to unseat Research In Motion. The software giant will make free upgrades available for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0 that will lift business email and other Outlook data from corporate computers and automatically send it to mobile phones running on Microsoft Windows software.

Microsoft took part of its MSN Web site offline over the weekend, after it learned of a flaw that could let an attacker gain access to Hotmail accounts, the company said. The MSN Web site contained a so-called cross-site scripting flaw, a Microsoft representative said on Monday. In its initial review of the issue, the company found that an attacker could use the vulnerability to obtain "cookies" from Hotmail users by getting them to click on a malicious URL. That could then grant access to those email accounts.

Mirroring a trend in the United States, Firefox continues to grow across Europe, but more slowly than it had. According to numbers released by French Web metrics company XiTi, Firefox accounted for 14.08 percent of browsers used to access a large sample of Web sites that use XiTi measurement software. That’s up from 13.31 percent in April and 11.60 percent in March.

A 7-year-old flaw that could let an attacker place malicious content on trusted Web sites has resurfaced in the most recent Firefox browser, Secunia has warned. The flaw, which also affects some other Mozilla Foundation programs, lies in the way the software handles frames, which are a way of showing Web content in separate parts of the browser window.

Citigroup, the world’s largest bank, said on Monday that account and payment history data on 3.9 million of its customers were lost in transit by United Parcel Service. The disappearance is the latest in a series of data breaches involving U.S. banks, including No. 2 Bank of America. New York-based Citigroup said the data was stored on computer tapes, and lost while UPS, was shipping them to an Experian credit bureau in Texas.

European regulators may be powerless to give open-source competitors effective access to Microsoft’s server protocols, despite antitrust rulings against the company and the EU’s ability to impose massive new fines. The European Commission has said a proposal submitted by Microsoft on implementing EU antitrust sanctions is the company’s last chance to avoid new fines, which could amount to 5 percent of Microsoft’s daily global sales.