Ancor IT director Kelly Colohan had a decision to make. Informed by IBM that it would no longer support MVS 2.10, the operating system he was running on his mainframe, Colohan had two choices. He could either stick with Big Blue by buying a new mainframe, or bump his ancillary servers up to the varsity and migrate. So Colohan took the 24 servers he already had, added six more and left IBM and its 2003-205 mainframe behind. The revamped network will run on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2000 operating systems.

The U.S. Department of Justice has inked a five-year deal with Microsoft competitor Corel, worth up to $13.2 million, for more than 50,000 licenses of Corel’s WordPerfect office suite, Corel announced this week. The DOJ, which sued Microsoft in a monopoly-busting case that started in the mid-1990s, used WordPerfect before Monday’s announcement, but Corel trumpeted the new deployment of WordPerfect Office 12 as reaffirming the software suite’s number two position in the market.

A fledgling unit of Microsoft will this week unveil the first fruits of its labor around a multi-year effort to knit together its collection of incompatible business management programs. The business unit, called Microsoft Business Solutions, represents Microsoft’s foray into the so-called enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software market in which Oracle and Germany’s SAP are wrestling for global dominance. The programs from each company are designed to automate a broad set of corporate tasks, from fielding customer service calls to organizing assembly lines.

After making several acquisitions to get itself in the business applications game, Microsoft developed Project Green, an effort that would bring the various products under a single code base in a few years. However, the timetable for the plan turned out to be both quicker than customers wanted and sooner than Microsoft could deliver.

Microsoft is beefing up its corporate instant-messaging product lineup with new extras like firewall traversal and collaboration, as it prepares to launch a new desktop communications client, possibly as early as Tuesday. All the development work is an attempt to kick-start a market for corporate instant messaging, which hasn’t grown as quickly as anticipated, although a growing number of businesses are increasingly making use of popular desktop IM clients.

Advanced Micro Devices will detail its "Pacifica" virtualization technology by the end of this month, enabling software companies to start working with the feature, which makes it easier for a computer to run several operating systems simultaneously. The Pacifica technology is scheduled to arrive in processors in 2006, later than the comparable Vanderpool technology–now officially called Intel Virtualization Technology–that is promised to appear this year in Intel chips. What’s not clear is whether the two technologies will be compatible, raising the prospect of complications for some software makers.

Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it. Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web journals, particularly those written outside of work hours. With search engines making it easy to find virtually anything anyone says in a blog these days, companies are taking notice–and taking action.

DS DEVELOPMENT has released version 2.5 of their email productivity software, Bells & Whistles for Outlook, an Outlook add-in that removes the daily frustrations of Outlook users by powering up Outlook with extras that let you do more with common tasks. Bells & Whistles for Outlook helps users to quickly reply to emails by automatically inserting personalized email reply greetings, reply subject counters, text templates or even silent email notes. During a one-time configuration process, users can easily pre-define the reply message format or automatic BCC, Forward or Reply-To addresses that will be smoothly applied to every outgoing email. For Microsoft Outlook 2003 users, Bells & Whistles enables the missing Outlook feature designed for automatically inserting replied addresses to the Outlook Contacts book.

A University of California researcher says he has found a way to identify computer hardware remotely, a technique that could potentially unmask anonymous Web surfers by bypassing some common security techniques. Tadayoshi Kohno, a doctoral student, wrote in a paper on his research: "There are now a number of powerful techniques for remote operating system fingerprinting, that is, remotely determining the operating systems of devices on the Internet. We push this idea further and introduce the notion of remote physical device fingerprinting…without the fingerprinted device’s known cooperation."

Outsourced customer service operations can cost almost a third more than those retained in-house, according to a new study by Gartner. The research firm found that outsourced operations are 30 percent more expensive than the top quartile of in-house customer service operations. Alexa Bona, research director at Gartner, said businesses often fail to take hidden costs, such as in-house backup support to the outsourced function, into account.