Microsoft discontinuing MSN Encarta as well as Microsoft Encarta student and Encarta premium software will not be available worldwide after 30 June 2009. MSN Encarta Japan will be available till 31December 2009. On October 31, 2009, MSN® Encarta® Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Gmail has introduced a new feature that will allow people to type E-Mail messages in Hindi.  If you are using Gmail from India then this feature will be enabled by default. If not, you’ll need to turn it on in the “Language” section under Settings. Once enabled, just click the Indian languages icon and type words in the way they sound in English — Gmail will automatically convert them to their Indian language equivalent.

Currently Gmail supporting five Indian languages Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, and businesses and schools using Google Apps should see this in the coming weeks.

Google informed their Sales and marketing people that they are planning to layoff 200 Google employees. Google is saying they are laying off these employees because of overlapping areas and over hiring during a more optimistic time.

Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, said in the blog post.

Today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally. We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business.

Google has grown very quickly in a very short period of time. When companies grow that quickly it’s almost impossible to get everything right—and we certainly didn’t. In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process. That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.

After the release of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 its having major performance issues. This performance pack made significant improvements in terms of Outlook’s performance and responsiveness:

• General Responsiveness – the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update reduces I/O disk usage and UI response time.
• Startup – the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update removes long operations from initial startup (please note that there is a one-time data structure upgrade cost after the first install that takes a relatively linear amount of time based on the size of your PSTs and OST).
• Shutdown – the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities (for more information, please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239276.aspx).
• Folder/View Switch – the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update improves view rendering and folder switching.

WLWBackup is a backup utility for Windows Live Writer for taking backup of Windows Live Writer. This includes blog settings, posts and plug-in. To run WLWBackup  on your computer is that you must have installed .Net Framework 3.5 SP1.

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Microsoft  offering Windows Home Server download to their MSDN subscribers. MSDN subscribers will be able to download Windows Home Server as of March 23, 2009. Currently Microsoft only offering Power Pack  disk but they have already released the power pack 2 also. There are currently 100+ add-ins developed for Windows Home Server (up from 70+ in January of this year).  Microsoft also has a  dedicated  Windows Home Server Add-ins page  on the Microsoft web site.

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NSS Labs published a report called “ Web Browser Security – Protection Against Socially Engineered Malware”.

NSS Labs results show that Microsoft internet Explorer RC1 able to catch 69% catch rate against Malware as compare to Apple Safari (24%) ,Mozilla Firefox v3.07(30%), Google Chrome v1.0.154916%), Opera v9.64(5%) and Microsoft IE7(4%). This data clearly show that Microsoft IE7 does not provide any protection against malware.

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Today Google added two new features to Google Search. First feature offers an expanded list of useful related searches and second one is longer search results description. Google employed a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your Google searches and one of the first applications offered by Google is useful related searches.

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YouTube is running Microsoft Silverlight in CBS’s dedicated channel for March Madness. In the CBS YouTube Channel located here: http://www.youtube.com/marchmadness there’s an embedded Sliverlight player which appears to be just the same as the one running on the free March Madness on Demand site.

This is really amazing that Microsoft video site that msn video is not using Silverlight technology but Google is able to use Silverlight technology in YouTube

Google added three new features to Google sites and Google site features will be very useful for premium customers.  Google added start page, private gadgets and end-to-end security features in Google site.

Start Page: Google site viewers can now customize and personalize Google sites pages that they visit. Google site pages created with start Page template allow individuals to add and organize their own gadgets to customize the page. The site owner chooses "Start Page" in the page type menu, and then adds content that they want everyone to see to the top of the page. Each viewer can then customize the page to see their own personal gadgets.

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