Microsoft is offering some researchers at the U.S. National Science Foundation free access to the Azure cloud. Whether this is a test ground for Microsoft to improve their offering or a chance to "hook" the scientists and their data remains to be determined.

Reader Jason Janes writes in with an obvious solution we missed.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Patch Tuesday is next week and Microsoft has a slew of patches. Among the fixes, five are rated critical. Included in this round of patches is one for the 17-year-old hole in Windows.

While Bing is being harnessed to do searches on Facebook, Microsoft is cutting back on its advertising on the site.

When software moves into the cloud many things change. In order to reflect the changes Microsoft is planning to add a new way of licensing software in the cloud.

Microsoft is trimming its enterprise search products of Unix/Linux capabilities after this year to focus on Windows.

Several people at Microsoft have been awarded a patent for a "personal data mining" system. The system would analyze all of your personal data – the books you read, your e-mails, the websites you visit – to "improve" the quality of your life and, apparently, sell you the solution.

SharePoint 2010 is promising a lot of new features, and requiring lots of new hardware and supporting software. If you’re looking for something a little more basic, or less costly, this article discusses three alternatives.

Another zero-day vulnerability on Internet Explorer 6. IE7 and 8 are less vulnerable because the user default is to run in "protected mode".

Adobe’s Flash Player is known to have a weakness. Microsoft added some code to Internet Explorer 7 and 8 to protect against the flaw. Not researchers have by-passed the protections, leaving Windows machines open to attack.