Microsoft and Lindows faced off in a Dutch court Tuesday over allegations the Linux operating system company infringed on the Windows trademark. Microsoft’s lawsuit, which seeks a fine of more than $100,000 per day, is one of several the company has filed against Lindows, in jurisdictions in North America and Europe, during the past two years.

A Northern California District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order to prevent SpamCop, an antispam operation, from interfering with messages sent by alleged junk emailer OptInRealBig.com. SpamCop fields people’s complaints about unwanted mail and their senders and uses that information to list the offending Internet Protocol addresses used to send the messages.

Microsoft and business software giant SAP on Wednesday announced a wide-ranging agreement to integrate their products using Web services. The deal, which calls for better links between Microsoft’s ..Net development software and SAP’s NetWeaver integration server, could help big companies more easily tie their SAP business applications to Microsoft Office and other Windows-based software.

Software maker Network Associates on Tuesday said it has joined the Trusted Computing Group, an industry body formed to develop and promote open standards for security technologies. Network Associates, which will change its name soon to McAfee, said it will help develop the Trusted Network Connect specification, which is intended to help network administrators put security policies in place on systems before they connect to multivendor networks.

In a move toward defeating software piracy, a spokesman for Microsoft has said that during installation, Windows XP Service Pack 2 will cross-check the product identification codes. If a code is found to be invalid, the installation will not continue.

Microsoft has posted a security alert for the Windows Help and Support Center in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The vulnerability is in the process that the Help and Support Center uses to validate the data from an HCP website.

Novell announced its Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server will be integrated into Evolution 2.0 and made available as open source, beginning with the current Connector 1.4. Evolution is Novell’s email and workgroup client for Linux systems.

IT managers can find the best way to block spam at their organizations simply by examining a few key aspects of their infrastructure. John R. Levine offered spam-fighting advice to attendees at last week’s TechTarget Enterprise Messaging Decisions conference.

Cooperation between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft probably won’t drastically alter the information technology landscape, analysts and IT professionals say, but it should eliminate some integration headaches.

The head of Microsoft’s platforms group says some features in the server version of the Longhorn operating system will be scaled back initially so that it can be released at about the same time as the client version, which will possibly ship in 2006.