Microsoft Dynamics 365 will be unveiled later this month

Microsoft will kick off its Dynamic Communities’ Summit 16 event on Oct. 11 in Tampa Bay, Florida—hurricane notwithstanding—with the introduction of Dynamics 365, the main suite in its line-of-business applications.Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, will lead the keynote, which will include live demos of the software and panel discussions for deep dives on what's new. The Summit is entirely devoted to Microsoft's Dynamics line-of-business apps, which includes Dynamics AX, CRM, GP and NAV.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You have one month to buy a Windows 7 (or 8.1) PC

It's time to bow to the inevitable: PC OEMs will cease selling machines pre-loaded with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 at the end of this month. The only PCs for sale after that will be leftover inventory, and once they are gone, it's an all-Windows 10 world.Microsoft does this with every operating system, and given that Windows 7 is now 7 years old, it was certainly time. It had pushed off its end of life by two years after the Windows 8 disaster, just like it had to extend Windows XP following Vista.Business users will still have the option of downgrading your Windows 10 machine to Windows 7, of course, and Microsoft is committed to supporting Windows 7 until 2020. You need installation media for Windows 7, and you’ll have to activate the system manually, but you probably already knew that.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Softbank chief explains why Steve Jobs inspired the ARM purchase

By any measure, Softbank is one massive conglomerate. It owns all or a chunk of Sprint, Vodaphone, ARM Holdings and Alibaba Group, among its many investments. The ARM deal was perhaps the oddest, and most expensive at $32 billion. The claim at the time of the purchase was it would give Softbank a window into the Internet of Things (IoT). But according to Softbank’s CEO, the reasoning goes back much further.Founder and CEO Masayoshi Son told Nikkei Asian Review that he'd had his eye on ARM for more than a decade, and it was due to a meeting with the late Steve Jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft is leaving the consumer mobile market

The weak effort from Microsoft surrounding the Windows Mobile line has made it pretty clear that the handset business isn't a priority. Now we have a clear statement from a Microsoft executive that the company is indeed giving up on mobile, at least for a time. The new president of Microsoft France gave an interview with a French publication where he said the company was indeed giving up on mobile. Vahé Torossian was introduced recently as the new president of the company's French subsidiary. He was previously corporate vice president of the Worldwide Small, Mid-market Solutions & Partners Group.And in an interview with Le Point, Torossian reiterated the current strategy Microsoft is pursuing: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft adds SharePoint support to OneDrive

Quite a lot of news came out of the Microsoft Ignite 2016 conference, most of which we have already covered. But there's more, as Microsoft announced a big upgrade to its OneDrive cloud storage service.Microsoft wants to provide a single sync client for all of its cloud storage services, whether its OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, and it has been for some time. To achieve this, it has added the ability to sync SharePoint Online document libraries with OneDrive folders,and added an "activity center" to the OneDrive sync client to allow you to view synchronization and file activity at a glance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Working around Apple’s inexplicable email app change

For the second time in a row, I find myself unmotivated to upgrade my iPhone. The 6S had nothing that appealed to me, and the 7 is a downright turn-off with its lack of a headset jack. Five years after Steve Jobs' death, and this is what passes for innovation at Apple. The only thing preventing a defection on my part is all the apps I've invested in won't transfer to Android, and I don't feel like repurchasing all of them.+ Also on Network World: Settings in iOS 10: Every notable change you need to know +In addition to the decidedly unappealing phone, iOS 10 made a baffling move that has left me wondering what Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer officer, and Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, are thinking. One of the more welcomed features in previous versions of iOS was the Trash All feature in Apple Mail. Prior to that you had to manually select every email for deletion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Figuring out the screwy smartphone pricing on Glyde

With the release of the iPhone 7, I was hoping to get a bargain on the iPhone 6 Plus. There was nothing in the 6S that appealed to me, and the 6 would be cheaper. So, I checked out the iPhone offerings on Glyde, where I have done business before to my satisfaction. As of last Wednesday, an iPhone 6 Plus, 16GB, on AT&T was $374. I decided to wait for a price drop. Two days later, the price fell remarkably to $311. Well, that's going in the right direction. I decided to wait for more changes. The next day, last Saturday, the price spiked to $455. That's definitely going in the wrong direction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft adds SMB support to retail outlets

Microsoft's retail outlets, creatively known as Microsoft Store, has been its answer to the wildly successful Apple Stores that helped push a lot of Apple product into the hands of consumers, especially Macs.Up to now, the more than 100 Microsoft Stores have been focused on the consumer market. However, Microsoft announced an expansion of the stores to include what it calls SMB Zones, providing small and mid-sized businesses with a chance to check out business-oriented products and technology and also get some consultations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bad migration experiences leave IT bosses gun-shy

Previous migration efforts are often so bad that the majority of IT pros drag their feet on doing another migration project, even if they need it. That's one of the results of a new study by a cloud migration specialist Vision Solutions.The migration survey -- see chart below -- was part of a larger study, the Vision Solutions' 8th Annual State of Resilience report.The problem, however, lies with many IT shops, according to Vision. They either lack expertise to do the job properly, don't plan well in advance, or both. Of the 935 professionals surveyed, 35 percent say that they lack the experience or the expertise to confidently perform a system migration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

End of the line for Microsoft Band?

Last week when I discussed the latest rumors surrounding Surface All-In-Ones, I added that there was no news on the Microsoft Band front. Now there apparently is news, and it's not the best.Microsoft's Band and Band 2 devices look like they run Windows 10, but they don't. They only run firmware. One of the rumors surrounding future Band products is that they would get the full OS, or at least enough of it to make it functional with PCs. That may not be the case, however. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports that the group working on bringing Windows 10 to Band was disbanded weeks ago. That doesn't necessarily mean Band 3 won't happen; it just means the group working on a Windows 10 port is gone. They could always release Band 3 with firmware just like the first two versions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel will be at 10nm for many years

For more than a decade, Intel was driven by a "tick/tock" development model. The "tick" took place one year and was a manufacturing process shrink, from 45nm to 32nm, for example. The "tock," which took place one year later, was a whole new microarchitecture, such as Penryn to Nehalem.For about a decade, tick/tock worked well. Intel choked the life out of the insurgent AMD and dominated the x86 market for a long time—and still does. But the limitations of physics have caught up with the company, and ticks are becoming much harder to come by. As it is, Intel delayed the move to 10nm by adding a third generation of 14nm chips called Kaby Lake. The shrink to 10nm was planned for next year's Cannonlake processor. Now word is that might be delayed another year, with 10nm coming in 2018. And the next shrink, down to 7nm, won't take place until after 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft gets support for its fight against government gag orders

Star Trek’s 50 years of technology, optimism and naiveté

Thursday marked the 50th birthday of a TV and film institution, "Star Trek," and was met with far more joy and happiness than most 50th birthdays are.What started as a struggling TV series that limped along for three years has become an institution and part of our culture, with terms, references, and catchphrases now a regular part of our lives.At the time of its creation, science fiction was more optimistic than it is today. It tried to envision a better future where our problems were solved.Even so, it took some serious brass to put an Asian, Russian, and black woman on the bridge of that ship in 1966. Creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to go one further and make the second-in-command a woman but that was a bridge too far, which paved the way for Spock.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s all-in-one Surface PCs could debut next month

A few months back I reported on rumors of new Surface-branded all-in-one PCs from Microsoft that could target both other all-in-ones as well as Apple's languishing iMac line. Now new information says they are coming soon.Citing her usual deep bench of sources, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet says there will be a hardware launch event in late October, one year after a New York City event at which Microsoft unveiled the Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, Lumia 950 and 950 XL.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Microsoft building a Slack killer?

A few months ago, rumors circulated that Microsoft considered buying the cloud-based team collaboration tool Slack for a generous $8 billion. Overpaying again, it seems, as Slack's last known valuation was $2.8 billion.Now it seems that Microsoft has decided to build rather than buy, using its own Skype messaging service as the basis for a new product. According to the site MSPoweruser, Microsoft is coming for the Slack market with a product called Skype Teams. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenOffice may be fading into the sunset

OpenOffice, the productivity suite viewed as an alternative to Microsoft Office developed as an open source project, is at serious risk of being closed down due to a lack of help. There have been only three updates since 2013, with the last coming in October 2015.The developers behind it have not only been slow to update the software, but they were slow to fix it. A major security flaw in July took a month to be patched, and while they were working on it, people with the project suggested switching to Microsoft Office or LibreOffice as temporary workarounds. An email entitled "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" (and first noted by Ars Technica) was sent out last week by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes freezing problems in Anniversary Update

Microsoft has issued fixes to the problem plaguing its Anniversary Update, aka Redstone, a major update to Windows 10 issued this past August. The fixes are available via the Windows Update utility.The Anniversary Update was an ambitious update, far more than a mere patch, so problems are not too big of a surprise. However, issues quickly piled up in this instance. Almost immediately there were reports of login issues, a bug causing webcams to fail, and Kindle's causing the PC to crash when the Kindle was plugged into the PC via USB.The big one, though, was freezing and slowdowns on the PC after installing the Anniversary Update. It took Microsoft roughly a month to figure out the problem, but users can now apply a Windows Update, which was released Aug. 31, to alleviate the problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft sets Windows 10 subscriptions at $7

Microsoft announced in July that it planned to offer a version of Windows 10 on a monthly subscription rate for enterprise customers, and today it officially launched Windows as a Service through its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) network.Businesses of any size can now subscribe to Windows 10 Enterprise E3, its official name, for $7 per user per month. In its announcement, Microsoft described E3 this way: "Windows 10 Enterprise E3 was designed for businesses that handle sensitive customer data (such as credit card or social security numbers), operate in regulated industries, or create and monetize intellectual property. These businesses need enterprise-grade security and management capabilities found in the Windows 10 Enterprise edition, such as Device Guard, Credential Guard and Managed User Experience." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDC predicts a rebound in tablet sales

Tablet sales have been in a serious downward spiral, but market research firm IDC has reason for optimism and believes they are due for a comeback.There is a caveat to that prediction, and that's because of a qualifier category: detachables. Tablet sales are already down 11.5 percent worldwide, while convertible and detachable devices are enjoying an uptick in sales, which is expected to continue through 2020, with shipments reaching 194.2 million as detachable tablets continue to take share from traditional PCs. + Also on Network World: Enterprise use of hybrid tablets growing fast +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The company behind Hillary Clinton’s erased emails is riding high

A small open source firm behind the erasure of Hillary Clinton's personal email server is enjoying a lot of free publicity thanks to the investigation into the server's contents. BleachBit, an open source system erasure tool, has been around for a few years and won some accolades, and now it's the center of attention on the Clinton email scandal.It started with Trey Gowdy, the Republican congressman from South Carolina leading the investigation into the private email server. He mentioned BleachBit in an interview, saying Clinton's 33,000 deleted emails have been "deleted where even God can't read them."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here