Stories by: John Fontana

Integration of traditional on-premises Notes-based collaboration, new unified communications tools, Symphony productivity applications, content management, Web-based services and the potential to mash it all together with new-fangled development tools and social networking innovations pouring out of IBM's research labs are just a few of the challenges facing IBM's Lotus Software division chief, Bob Picciano.

Google and Microsoft last week traded counter-punches over voice and social networking tools as the two continue to battle each other over emerging technologies.

Microsoft Wednesday released an updated bundle of infrastructure servers for small business and its first-ever offering tailored to midsized businesses, and said the two would evolve alongside the company's software-plus-services strategy.

Microsoft next week will distribute a pre-beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 to a select group of testers and highlight the software's virtualization capabilities, integration with Windows 7 and other features.

Sxip, which develops the free single sign-on plug-in for Firefox called Sxipper, is working to revolutionize the use of address books by helping Web surfers link their contacts to information they are searching for on the Web.

Microsoft's Windows Azure operating system and the online platform it anchors will ship in the second half of 2009, and its pricing will be based a set of usage metrics, according to the company's newly posted Azure Web site.

This week, Microsoft took the wraps off the cloud operating system that CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at earlier this month and that has been under development for two years under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Named Azure, it is the foundation of what will become the hosting platform run by Microsoft, first in its own data centers and potentially licensed to other data-center providers. The release is the first part of Microsoft's services platform, and it provides an outline for where Azure is going.

The sprawl of management consoles, the proliferation of data they provide and the rising use of virtualization are adding challenges to corporations looking to more effectively manage mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments.

Unified communications involves a series of technology decisions and this is where users will consider IM, presence and unified messaging options and the best methods for attacking rollouts and integration.

IBM, LexisNexis and the Secret Service are among a group of corporations, government agencies and academic institutions that has formed to study and help solve identity management challenges around cybercrime, terrorism and narcotics trafficking.

The Mono Project, which develops an open source implementation of the .Net Framework, released the long-awaited 2.0 version on Monday.