Microsoft

Office 12, which is expected to be completed by the second half of 2006, will let end users take an Office document and convert it to PDF format, Brian Jones, a program manager for Microsoft Office, said in a blog posting. People will not be able to actually read PDF files from within Office applications; a PDF viewer will still be required, he noted.

The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio and InfoPath, Jones said.

Microsoft is making a concentrated effort to change its relationship with the hacking community, including getting help from hackers on new software applications. The Beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 7 was presented at the Hack in the Box Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with Microsoft looking for feedback on how to improve it. According to Tony Chor, the Internet Explorer team's group program manager, "It's the first time we've ever come out ahead of a product release to present and get feedback."

Microsoft has presented a preliminary beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 7 to an audience of hackers at the Hack in the Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The presentation marked the first time that the company has spoken about security for~its browser,~which has been ridden with vulnerabilities over the years.

Microsoft does not typically present products to the security community before their release.

Microsoft has stepped into the lion's den and revealed some the work that's been done on Internet Explorer 7 to a group of hackers.

The company showed the beta at the Hack in the Box Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was pleased with the result. "It's the first time we've ever come out ahead of a product release to present and get feedback," said Tony Chor, group program manager at Microsoft's Internet Explorer team.

Microsoft Corp. showed off the preliminary work it has done on the second beta version of its popular Internet Explorer, version 7, at the Hack in the Box Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and came away with some good feedback, managers at the company said Thursday.

MICROSOFT will tout the new safety features of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 during a keynote presentation at the upcoming Hack in the Box Security Conference (HITBSecConf2005) to be held in Kuala Lumpur at the end of this month.

Microsoft on Tuesday in the US announced a sweeping reorganisation of the company into three new divisions, a shift that will lead to the retirement of longtime Windows development chief Jim Allchin.

The plan calls for the restructure of Microsoft into three large divisions led by individual presidents, each reporting to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive.

The first time around, Microsoft Corp. wanted to establish a beachhead in the video game business. Now, with its much anticipated Xbox 360 console, it wants to rule that $25 billion global market.

The world's largest software company aims to break even in the first year or two after it starts selling the Xbox 360, the successor to the first-generation Xbox, as it tries to knock rival Sony Corp. from its position of market leadership.

In a move that shows just how far Microsoft Corp. has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products.

At the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft said it will allow programmers to use its latest front-end development tools to write applications that run on operating systems other than Windows Vista, the forthcoming edition of desktop Windows.

The company introduced Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or WPF/E, software to build applications using Microsoft's XAML page layout language in conjunction with JavaScript.