The process towards certifying the Microsoft-backed Office Open XML as a standard moved closer to reality Monday, as the Ecma standards body said that the format will be put to a five-month vote to standardize it.

A vote would mean that Open XML could become a standard as early as August, and will make both ODF and itself as competing ISO standards. OpenDocument received ISO standardization last May.

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Xerox continued its expansion Monday, announcing it had agreed to a $1.46 billion deal to acquire Global Imaging Systems, a company that sells office-imaging products and services.

The acquisition is its biggest in the past year. In July of last year, Xerox acquired Amici, a company that provides services for electronic discovery in court cases, and then picked up XMPie, a multimedia marketing campaign software maker in November.

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Microsoft has tweaked the licensing for Windows Vista slightly to allow users of the Enterprise version of its software to use the operating system in non-traditional environments, such as diskless PCs.

The changes were announced at Microsoft's Management Summit 2007, an annual event held for IT management professionals in Redmond. The company says its customers had been requesting the licensing changes so that IT administrators could experiment with new management architectures.

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Microsoft confirmed Sunday that it would not wait until April's "Patch Tuesday" to release a fix correcting a critical flaw in Windows Animated Cursor Handling, which affects most supported versions of the company's operating systems. Instead, an update is coming Tuesday.

The exploit, which results in a crash-restart-crash loop, is triggered by a buffer overflow in an animated cursor file. A similar flaw was discovered in early 2005, but did not apparently affect Windows XP Service Pack 2. The new issue, discovered by McAfee's Avert labs does impact XP SP2 and Windows Vista, as well as Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows Server 2003.

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Although earlier reports have indicated Microsoft was close to a deal with online advertising firm DoubleClick, sources now say Google is emerging as a top contender as the price of the company continues to grow.

The Wall Street Journal said Monday that as the likely acquisition price surpassed the $2 billion mark, Microsoft has been slow in responding with a counter offer. Negotiations were described as "fluid," although a deal could be announced in days.

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12:00 pm ET April 2, 2007 - In what could be a watershed moment for the digital entertainment industry, leading music publisher EMI Group announced today it would provide most of its music catalog to listeners without any digital rights management restrictions.

And making Apple CEO Steve Jobs live up to his promises from earlier this year, the two companies have reached a breakthrough agreement where DRM-free EMI music will be available on iTunes next month.

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Google struck back at Viacom through the media on Thursday, responding to a March 24 op-ed by Viacom's general counsel Michael Fricklas in the Washington Post with a letter of its own from Google's counsel for the case.

Managing Counsel Michael Kwun called the Viacom suit "an attack on the way people communicate on the Web and on the platforms that allow people to make the Internet their own," saying it was abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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Customers who purchased Office Student and Teacher 2003 after October 26, 2006 planning to take advantage of the "Technology Guarantee Program" that offered a free upgrade to Office 2007 have found themselves missing Outlook due to a packaging change.

At issue is the new Office Home and Student 2007, which replaces the former Student and Teacher SKU. Unlike its predecessor, Microsoft Outlook is not included in the update; therefore, Microsoft promised to send the product on a separate disc to those customers taking advantage of the promotion.

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The World Trade Organization is pushing back against Internet gambling restrictions passed by United States, saying Friday it had ruled that the provision was illegal. The US will have the option to appeal.

A complaint was brought before the group by Antigua and Barbuda, where many offshore online casinos are located. It stems from a 2005 verdict by the WTO that ruled some of the US' restrictions ran afoul of WTO policies.

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Not content to wait for Microsoft to remedy the issue, independent security firm eEye released a temporary patch for a critical flaw affecting Windows that can lead to a crash-restart-crash loop. But Microsoft does not recommend such third-party patches.

The potential exploit is trigger by a buffer overflow in an animated cursor file. A similar flaw was discovered in early 2005, but did not apparently affect Windows XP Service Pack 2. The new issue, discovered by McAfee's Avert labs does seem to impact XP SP2 and Windows Vista, as well as Windows 2000 SP4 and versions of Windows Server 2003 from the initial release through to SP1.

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Microsoft continues to press forward with its Genuine Software Initiative, saying it is seeing progress in combating pirate software. However, it also warns that the battle is far from over.

So far, some 600 million plus validations have been processed since Microsoft started Windows Genuine Advantage in July 2005. It says its outreach efforts with law enforcement and government officials are also paying off for the company.

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Apple has signed a deal with Major League Baseball to bring sports highlights to its iTunes Store for $1.99 USD. The content includes a "MLB.com Daily Rewind" highlight show, as well as two weekly "Game of the Week" full-length games.

To help promote its new downloads, MLB is offering a free "2007 Season Preview Show" to all iTunes users. An iTunes "Season Pass" for the highlight show will cost $7.99 USD, and run $19.99 USD for all full games. Apple TV owners will also be able to stream the highlights and games directly to the television for viewing in the living room.

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Gaming company Take-Two has undergone massive management change as a group of shareholders owning nearly half of the company were successful in removing the entire board and chief executive.

The group hopes that the sweeping change will help the videogame maker regain its financial footing and recover from problems related to a stock-options scandal and other issues, which caused the company to become unprofitable.

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ICANN rejected a proposal to create a domain for adult websites for the third time Friday, after the plan received criticism from world governments, religious groups, and members of the adult entertainment industry.

Porn sites felt that the creation of .xxx would eventually cause anti-porn advocates to press governments to make it mandatory to use the domain. Religious groups felt that a domain would legitimize pornography.

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In an acknowledgment this afternoon that the worst may yet come to pass, Dell Computer stated its audit committee looking into irregularities in its financial reporting in advance of an SEC investigation, "has identified a number of accounting errors, evidence of misconduct, and deficiencies in the financial control environment."

As a result, the company may be venturing into dangerous territory further than any other US publicly traded company has gone before, by stating now it doubts it will be able to file its annual 10-K report for the last fiscal year even by the typical extended deadline of April 18, were it to ask for an extension.

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