Wow. That’s the longest title I’ve ever posted on a blog. Well Microsoft is known to be pretty fancy and they like to come up with buggy software. I’m not very familiar with their “old” Systems Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 but they are already bringing out new software even tho 2007 is not over yet. Good luck to them as they eat away at the Call center help desk software market.

The System Center Service Desk is a “new member of the System Center family and a product that pulls [management] all together,” Muglia said, noting the platform will offer Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-based workflows and change control logic to enable IT administrators, business managers and end users to collaborate on processes that combine various System Center components.

The Service Desk, for example, will use the Windows Workflow Foundation in Windows Vista and server and will integrate knowledge and process-based logic from a simple, unified console IT administrators and partners can use.

New Microsoft System Center Service Desk and Virtualization manager Code-named Carmine source.

I’m pleased to hand over the authorship of Microsoft Future to Colbert Low who will start blogging here shortly.

Colbert has had a varied career in technology writing for various websites. He is perhaps best known for authoring the gadget blog at Weblog Empire and moving that across to b5media.

I’m delighted to welcome Colbert into the Syntagma Media team.

IEblog has nnounced the release of the Beta 2 version of IE7 for Windows XP SP2:

This evening we released IE7 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie. This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it.

We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days.

The European Union’s Trademark and Design Office, is claiming that Microsoft’s new font for Windows Vista and Office 2007 is a copy of Frutiger Next, a design patented by Linotype, an old German company.

The agency says that Segoe’s letterforms “differ only in minor details” from Frutiger. The three judges in the case noted that Microsoft disputed the documentation of Druckmaschinen’s fonts but “does not contest the claim of the Applicant that they should be considered identical.”

Microsoft applied for at least eight design registrations in January 2004 for different weights of Segoe UI, its user interface font. However, Linotype’s parent company, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, has appealed against the move.

Jensen Harris, a Microsoft program manager, has written: “We’re not just introducing a new UI in Office [2007] — we’re also introducing a new UI font. It was conceived, designed, and totally optimized for ClearType,” a technology that smooths fonts on LCD screens. It will be turned on by default for the first time in Windows Vista.