With Windows 7 poised to begin private testing any time now and to ship by late 2009, a number of business users are wondering whether they should simply skip Windows Vista all together and wait for 7 instead.

Microsoft, not surprisingly, is advising customers against taking a pass on Vista. As part of a new white paper aimed at influencing business users who are evaluating when and whether to move to Windows Vista, Microsoft is advocating enterprise users should migrate to Vista sooner rather than later.

The white paper–"The Business Value of Windows Vista: Five Reasons to Deploy Now"–doesn’t include a lot of new data; instead, it revisits the business features Microsoft built into Vista and highlights some of the new deployment tools and case-study examples of companies who have migrated to Vista. But it does offer Microsoft’s official guidance on Windows 7 deployments.

Fotolia, an online marketplace for micro-priced digital stock images, announced a program that makes available a free collection of 500 images and illustrations to Microsoft Office customers through Microsoft Office Online. The collection size will increase over time as the partnership expands to additional markets in the future.

The collection offers a wide variety of Fotolia images in various themes that Microsoft customers can add to their Microsoft Office documents. Customers can go directly from downloading regular resolution images on Office Online to purchasing a higher resolution file on Fotolia.

Amid speculation about its mysterious BrowserPlus platform, Yahoo released a sneak preview of the software for programmers. Developed over the last year by Yahoo programmers, BrowserPlus is Yahoo’s RIA (rich Internet application) for porting more desktop capabilities to Web applications.

Users may leverage BrowserPlus to drag and drop content from the desktop to Web sites; crop, rotate and filter images from the computer; enable easier file uploads; and receive native desktop notifications, wrote Yahoo’s BrowserPlus team in a blog post May 27. When it is released to developers this year, BrowserPlus will be gliding into a market for RIAs, where Google, Adobe and Microsoft are all vying for their share of developers to help build out dynamic new Web applications. Killer apps built from these platforms will attract the most users, leading to revenue opportunities for the vendors.

Yahoo set plans on Tuesday to hold its annual shareholder meeting on August 1 in the heart of Silicon Valley, setting the stage for a showdown with activist investor Carl Icahn, who is mounting a proxy fight for control of the company.

Earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that Icahn, a billionaire investor, would seek to remove Jerry Yang as Yahoo chief executive, citing the company’s failure, so far, to reach a merger or partnership deal with Microsoft.

Icahn has proposed an alternate slate of directors for Yahoo’s board, but had not directly targeted Yang over the breakdown in talks early this month for a $47.5 billion deal.

Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualization option for Windows Server 2008, has taken another step toward final release. Released for download by Microsoft on May 20, Release Candidate 1 adds support for Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 for both x86 and x64. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will be available in a future update, according to the release notes for the LIC (Linux Integration Components) add-on software.

As more and more people exclusively use PCs to maintain their most valuable documents, including family photos and video, extensive music collections, even crucial work files, the risks posed by accidental data deletion can represent a true personal catastrophe. What’s worse, many people who lose files aren’t aware that readily available, easy-to-use software exists that can instantly restore precious documents and irreplaceable digital photos they feared were gone forever.

To prevent this frustrating, yet reversible data loss from imperiling users’ important files, iolo technologies announced the release of a new, even easier-to-use version of its Search and Recover software, which allows even non-expert users to quickly recover accidentally deleted files even years after the data was lost.

Safeguarding your data is no longer an option but is a necessity. Government legislation has issued directives for organizations to report publicly if any security breach that has caused to compromise personal information. Despite this requirement, most enterprises, large corporate can only account for 60% of their computing possessions and even more shocking, 73% of companies do not have specific security policies documented for their laptop or desktop computers.

Disk Doctors File Shredder recently launched by Disk Doctors Labs is a desktop tool that can be used to securely erase important files and wipe all its traces from any windows based operating environment.

Adobe is launching a couple of new products, one of which is aiming squarely at the online document creation and collaboration market. Acrobat.com (Beta) features online Word processing, file sharing, and the ability to hold online meetings. Buzzword is the name of the word processing application allows multiple participants to create and edit documents online via Adobe Share. Adobe Brio is the online meeting application.

The other product Adobe is rolling out is Acrobat 9 which now includes Flash into its PDF creation software. You can now create a document that supports embedded Flash as a component of the document.

Since the advent of the PDA–and to a lesser degree, cell phones and laptops–workers have been decrying the end of vacation as they know it. Technology has given employers the ability to reach workers at all times in all places–making it impossible for employees to maintain boundaries between times off and being on-the-clock. The villains in these equations were a combination of pushy bosses, workers with poor time-management skills and wireless connectivity.

However, reports and studies increasingly suggest that many workers simply can’t disconnect. One in four workers said they plan to stay connected with work while they’re on vacation this summer, a percentage that has nearly doubled in the last two years, according to a survey released by CareerBuilder.com May 20.

Microsoft has officially opened registration for its Professional Developers Conference to be held Oct. 27-30 in Los Angeles. Tim O’Brien, senior director of Microsoft platforms, said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, will keynote the event and Windows 7 also will make an appearance.

O’Brien said considerable focus will be placed on services and development for serices, particularly REST-ful (Representational State Transfer) Web services. "It won’t be a WS-Star festival," O’Brien said, noting that the event will not focus on the core Web services stack dominated by Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) related specifications. Microsoft has published a preliminary list of representative sessions "that only hints at the 160+ sessions we’ll cover at PDC2008," the company said on the Web page describing the event.