Josh Ledgard Program Manager working with the Visual Studio – Community Team at MSFT has a great post regarding the broader collaboration between Microsoft and the vast open source community (via /.).

“It should be easy for teams here at Microsoft to develop extensions to their platforms and potentially pieces of the platforms with customers in an open/transparent fashion. What better way (especially for teams that make tools for developers) to form real connections with developers than working with them collaboratively on real technical challenges?”

Samuel Druker the Microsoft Development Lead for WinFS speaks on Channel 9 in video and in the threads about how WinFS will mean much more than simply full-text searching. (via Philipp Lenssen)

Quotes from Samuel regarding WinFS differences with respect to the current crop of Personal Search Tools:

“X1 (and enfish and lookout) do the job for full-text search on the stuff they know about in the particular application they support. However, WinFS is a database platform. As I said in the other video, it’s a storage platform. Developers write new apps, those apps use schemas to describe the user’s data and rely on the system repository to hold those items. Full-text search is just one thing that you can build on that. Much more important, IMO, is what the database guys call query and relations.”

My buddy Martin over at BA-Insight (who incidentally kicked-off a great new blog on enterprise search) sent me a link to this article on CNET about comments Bill Gates made during a media briefing in Sydney Australia regarding the new revamped MSN Search capabilities Microsoft is set to release in July. Here are some interesting yet not surprising quotes from the article.

“Microsoft’s chairman told a media briefing here that the company had “several milestones with its search site” on the way.”

Scott Woodgate over at MSDN TV demos “how easy it is to build a business process using Visual Studio .NET and BizTalk Server 2004, expose that business process as a Web service, and then consume the business process inside InfoPath – all within 20 minutes.”

After spending a week learning how to do something similar with the Integration Tools found in PeopleSoft 8.44 I can honestly say that VS.Net + BizTalk Server 2004 is wicked cool.

MSDN posted this week a series of InfoPath 2003 SP-1 Training Exercises for the recent preview of InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1.

I haven’t had time yet to run through the exercises, but they seem to be a good primer for anyone interested in utilizing InfoPath. (Thanks for the link Martin!)

MSFT made a preview of OneNote 2003 SP1 available yesterday.

In addition to being able to “Record video notes”, there are a number of other niceties too — like for example inserting documents from other Office programs into OneNote and the ability to share OneNote sessions in real time.

IMHO, OneNote is a wonderful environment for aggregating and now sharing disparate information.

Yet, there’s still no mention of MSFT opening the file format.

Among the many interesting quotes in the recent Business Week Online Article regarding Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis, I found the following quote suggesting that one of the features scrapped from the initial release of Longhorn will be in the updated file system (WinFS).

In particular, it appears that WinFS will not include the ability to index and search corporate file systems.

“Longhorn will now ship with a scaled-back version of the file system. The current plan, in practical terms, means people will be able to search their PCs for documents and information related to each other, but they won’t be able to reach into corporate servers for similar files.” (link via John Battelle)

At work, when I evangelize the benefits of using InfoPath as a tool for structured data collection and distribution, I talk about how, IMHO, InfoPath will someday unlock all the black-box business intelligence stuffed into Excel, Word, PowerPoint et al. In addition, I mention that it’s primarily an end-user tool that doesn’t require developers to implement any of those simple form-based workflow processes that deluge most corporations with endless forest killing paper forms.

CNET has an article that highlights some of Mr. Gates’ comments during a speech at the RSA Security conference held this week in SF.

In particular, the following comment, which we’ve heard before with the hype around Smart Cards, but hopefully the obvious end to passwords will come to fruition sooner this time than later (this time).

“Bill Gates predicted the demise of the traditional password because it cannot “meet the challenge” of keeping critical information secure.”

Via CNET I just read that today Microsoft released an update for InfoPath

“Microsoft released a trial version Monday of its first major update to InfoPath, the new electronic forms application released last year as part of the Office family.”

“The beta version of Service Pack 1 (SP1) includes several significant new features, said Microsoft product manager Bobby Moore, along with the typical performance enhancements and bug fixes included in a service pack…”