Windows 8, the most significant upgrade to Microsoft's operating system since Windows 95 and one of the most important products in the company's history, will not achieve enough adoption in enterprises to be considered a standard, according to Forrester Research.

By the time the next major Windows upgrade is released, Windows 8 will be in less than 50 percent of workplace PCs, unable to overtake its predecessor Windows 7.

While Amazon is still king in the cloud computing world, it appears that Microsoft's Azure software is on the up and up. Not only have Azure subscriptions risen 48 percent over the past six months, but Azure and related Microsoft cloud service software earned $1 billion in revenue over the past year for the first time ever, according to Bloomberg.

Making the "billion-dollar club" is pretty significant -- considering the slumping PC market. Microsoft revealed these new performance details to Bloomberg in an interview.

Microsoft said that Office 365 "net seat additions" grew five times compared with the same quarter last year, and that 25 percent of the company's enterprise customers now have Office 365, which is now on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate.

However, Microsoft isn't saying how many Office 365 seats it has sold. Moreover, the 25 percent enterprise adoption stat includes both instances where the suite has been widely deployed and scenarios where it may be used in a limited fashion.

Revenue for the Microsoft Business Division (MBD) in the first quarter was $6.1 billion, 5 percent above 2012's first quarter when adjustments for a free Office upgrade program were excluded. Office 365, Microsoft's expanded subscription program that it's promoted for both businesses and consumers -- and on which the company is pinning plans to drive future income -- will account for about 4 percent of the division's revenue for the fiscal year, Microsoft said.

Microsoft is pushing Azure cloud service to the 5,000 attendees at its management conference this week, encouraging them to take advantage of the system now for specific tasks but to keep in mind that it fits into a full-blown hybrid-cloud framework that may become more attractive to them over time.

During the keynote of Microsoft Management Summit 2013 the company announced that customers can now use Active Directory that is based within the Azure cloud to gate access to resources hosted there.

Microsoft offered more details on Tuesday about its plans to integrate SharePoint and Yammer, saying it'll give Office 365 customers the option of replacing SharePoint Online's activity-stream component with Yammer's. The option will go live with an upgrade of Office 365 this summer.

Microsoft is offering college students its cloud-based Office service free for six months, a move that could help solidify Office as a package they’ll want to keep using once they graduate. The offer gives eligible students Office 365 for three months plus an additional three months if they share the offer on their Facebook pages.

The bundle comes with 20G Byte of extra space in SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service that enables customers to access documents from phones, tablets and PCs.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) now offers its more than 180 National Societies the option to adopt Office 365, Microsoft's cloud-based suite of email, collaboration and productivity software.

The IFRC's decision to make Office 365 available to its in-country organizations is part of its effort to help those of them which have fallen behind in technology -- estimated at more than a third of all National Societies.

Microsoft has upgraded its existing Office 365 cloud email and collaboration suites for businesses, as well as introduce new bundles, growing even more the list of Office 365 editions, which some analysts and users had already termed somewhat confusing.

The components of the Office 365 suites for businesses, like the web-hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, have been upgraded to the latest 2013 code base of the products.

In addition, Microsoft has introduced three new configurations of the suite.

Orange Business Services, Polycom et LifeSize ont profité de la première conférence Lync de Microsoft, du 19 au 21 février à San Diego, pour annoncer l’intégration de la dernière version de la solution de communication et collaboration unifiée (UCC) de Redmond dans leurs offres.