Microsoft and its partners say the adoption cycle for Windows Vista is still in the early stages, particularly for businesses -- many of which are likely waiting for the release of Service Pack 1. Likewise, many businesses need to upgrade their hardware to run Vista, which is a major proposition. For consumers, this holiday season is the first in which Vista-loaded computers will be on store shelves.

Still, one year after Vista and Office were launched for businesses, some headlines today might have some people at Microsoft cringing.

There's this, from CNET, on a Qualys study that shows a major increase in Microsoft flaws between 2006 and 2007. "We have seen a huge jump in the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office products," Amol Sawate, manager of Qualys' vulnerability-management lab, told CNET. "These charts show growth of nearly 300 percent from 2006 to 2007, primarily in new Excel vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited by getting unsuspecting users to open Excel files sent via e-mail and instant message."

And the AP's locally based correspondent covering Microsoft, Jessica Mintz, has this report on tests showing that an updated Windows XP will perform faster next year than Vista. Key passage:

    [The testers] found the original Vista performed 50 percent to 100 percent slower than the prevalent XP Service Pack 2, or SP2.

    Vista SP1, due out in the first quarter of 2008, barely improved the operating system's performance.

    But XP SP3, scheduled for the first half of 2008, did improve on XP's earlier performance, running 10 percent faster than SP2.

Microsoft says its too early to make such comparisons.

In the first major Windows Server announcement since its worldwide partner conference in July, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) offered a substantive look into its server virtualization and pricing strategy.

Monday at the TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona, Microsoft announced that its widely awaited server virtualization technology, previously code-named Viridian, will hereafter be known as Hyper-V.

Microsoft also unveiled plans to offer 8 different SKUs for Windows 2008, three of which will ship with Hyper V:

• Windows Server 2008 includes one virtual instance per license and sells for $999 (with 5 Client Access Licenses).
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise includes four virtual instances per license and sells for $3,999 with 25 CALs.
• Windows Server 2008 Datacenter includes unlimited virtual instances per license and sells for $2,999 per processor.

Microsoft, which is also selling Hyper V as a $28 standalone offering for Linux and Unix machines, will ship a beta version of Hyper V along with Windows Server 2008.

Then, in the second half of next year Microsoft will push out the final version of Hyper V through Windows Update, said Andy Lees, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Server and Tools Marketing and Solutions group.

"Like any beta technology, we don't recommend using Hyper V in production until the final bits are released," said Lees.

Lees noted that Microsoft used the same approach with the release of clustering technology in SQL Server 2005. "Releasing a non-production copy in the SQL 2005 release worked out well because we were able to gather feedback, and then the final bits were of an even higher quality," Lees said.

While previous Microsoft announcements of new product versions and licensing have been somewhat confusing, the vendor has been pretty clear about its server virtualization intentions, says Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, an Oakland, Calif.-based Microsoft Gold partner.

Microsoft also announced the general availability of System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, all of which provide important management functions for server virtualization.

"From a management standpoint, it's important to have a top-to-bottom view of the entire virtualization infrastructure," said Lees.

Microsoft said that it's giving away Search Server 2008 Express in release candidate form to anyone who wants it, just by downloading directly from Microsoft's Web site here. The Express version is the sibling to the enterprise-strength version of Microsoft Search Server 2008, which the company debuted at an enterprise search conference in San Jose, Calif.

According to a press release issued by the company, Search Server 2008 Express packages up the enterprise search capabilities found in SharePoint Server 2007. With it come free connectors for searching among data and documents in EMC's Documentum and IBM's Filenet document management systems. Microsoft says that it's working with other partners to provide more connectors and federated search features that support the OpenSearch standard.

Jonathan Kauffman, general manager of Microsoft's Enterprise Search group, points to several other key features of the Express version in his blog: "relevancy tuning, security-trimmed search results and great out-of-the-box administration and reporting." What's also noteworthy, says Kauffman, is that Express also imposes no limits to the number of documents that can be indexed and searched.

Microsoft Search Server 2008 itself will be available to the general public in January, and only to Microsoft's volume licensing program customers; that version, according to the press release, adds enterprise deployment and scalability options.

To read more about Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express, click here. To read about partners developing federated search connectors that will work with Search Server, go here.

On Monday VMWare announced the release of VMware Fusion 1.1, an update to its "virtual machine" software for Intel-based Macs. A free update for registered users, VMware Fusion costs $79.99.

Fusion enables Intel-based Mac users to run other X86-based operating systems like Windows and Linux at the same time as they're running Mac OS X; the software operates the other operating systems as "virtual machines" running simultaneously with the host operating system.

The 1.1 update adds official support for Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard," and further improves 3D graphics support, with experimental support for DirectX 9.0. Unity, which lets users minimize Windows applications to the Mac OS X Dock, switch between Mac and Windows apps using Exposi and more, has also been improved. Support has been added for Vista Boot Camp partitions as virtual machines, and the software has been localized for French, German and Japanese. Performance has been improved as well.

VMware has also introduced VMware Importer, a new beta application that lets Fusion users import virtual machines created using VMware Fusion's principal Mac rival, Parallels Desktop. You can download it from the "Drivers & Tools" tab on the VMware Fusion 1.1 download page.

The Windows Automatic Update brouhaha that arose last month and erupted again this week is not so much a problem with the program itself but perhaps a patch management and change control issue, observers say.

"This is really a cue, if you're an admin, to look at control over configurations of AU as well as user access rights," said Gil Kirkpatrick, chief technical officer of Phoenix, Ariz.-based NetPro, a Windows security and infrastructure consultancy,"It appears that if this is something that happened to specific users, it should have been audited beforehand or known beforehand."

The controversy has its roots in complaints from a recent discussion thread on AeroXperience.com -- a Windows enthusiast portal -- where it was revealed that some users had configured Windows Update to download but not install updates. These users discovered that their machines had rebooted overnight after installing updates automatically, causing some to lose critical application data. Further, the users reported that the Windows Update configuration had somehow reverted to the "install automatically" setting.

Microsoft this week denied any wrongdoing, stating in a blog entry that a detailed inspection of customer logs found that none of the patches doled out during this month's Patch Tuesday release"have made any changes to users' AU settings."

That wasn't the case last month, as Redmond conceded that it had silently updated the Windows Update apparatus in various OS versions without alerting customers.

As for this week's events, Microsoft suggested that components outside of Windows Update may be responsible for the changes, which is puzzling to some since Microsoft has just about corned the market in terms update programs for a Windows environment. In August, Microsoft's legal department even went so far as to contact independent vendors such as AutoPatcher.com and order them to stop developing mechanisms to help in updating Windows programs and applications.

"In this week's case it may very well be a foreign application that's causing this but to say Microsoft's absolutely not at fault would be simplistic," said Gerret Grajeck, founder and chief operating officer of Irvine, Calif.-based IT security firm Multi-Factor Authentication, Inc."The AU has a great impact about how programs on the OS are allowed to run and I'm concerned not just for my customers but about how my product might be affected by such unwanted updates."

Overall, servers running Windows in a complex processing environment might find it more expedient to use AU, but as Net Pro's Kirkpatrick points out, regardless of what Microsoft finds in subsequent investigations about AU, IT pros on the ground need to be thorough.

Grajek agreed, noting that enterprises usually take special precautions with update verifications during gestation periods for new programs and applications at the server level. He suggests that maybe it's time to go deeper and apply the same approach with OSes, hardware and workstations.

"When you look at companies that do regression testing at the server level, you kind of think that enterprises may need to look at how to do the same thing on the client side," Grajek said."This would put that extra assurance in place and prevent something like this from happening."