New ISA Server, Search, Tablet OS Share Comdex Spotlight

The demos included what the company said was the first public showing of Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2004. (See story.)

That product, with as-yet-undisclosed ship date, promises to let administrators easily set up access rules for the web. For example, an admin can let all PC users in a group connect to web sites to enable surfing but also prevent them from using peer-to-peer applications that might compromise network security, said Zachary Gutt, technical product manager for Microsoft Security Products Group.

He showed how a ISA Server 2004's new HTTP Filter feature can, unlike other firewalls, distinguish between various types of web traffic and stop some while allowing others to continue. The set up is accomplished via an easy check-box and drag-and-drop UI .

ISA Server is "a firewall-like" product that provides application-layer security, Gates told several thousand Comdex attendees. "It can be used by itself or with a traditional firewall to parse software commands."

The upcoming version, code-named Stingray, has been in beta since summer.

Also discussed was new "SmartScreen" spam-filtering technology to be incorporated later into Exchange Server 2003. Early versions of the technology are already usedin Hotmail, MSN 8, and the Outlook 2003 client, Microsoft said.

Bobby Moore, product manager for Office demonstrated an insurance claim application using Office System 2003, Visual Studio Tools for Office and a Tablet PC. The application would let an insurance agent on the road annotate Word documents within Windows, bring up a survey, enter responses via pen input. The results are tabulated under the covers in an application written in C#. In the past such applications would have been written in the less powerful Visual Basic Applications (VBA) toolset.

He also showed near real-time recognition of "inked" input in a tablet input panel. New context awareness, also to be a feature of the upcoming Windows XP for the Tablet PC update, will stop confusing numerical input for letters and vice versa based on the type of field being filled in, Moore said.

A Microsoft spokesman afterwards said the demo used the next release of Windows XP tablet edition, code-named Lonestar, due in mid-2004.

Microsoft started talking about this upgrade, an interim release to a Longhorn-version of the Tablet operating system, last month at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

As for search, an increasingly hot topic of late, senior researcher Susan Dumais showed off a search prototype, now known internally as "Stuff I've Seen." The goal is to let users find things hidden in their hard drives, or theoretically across many devices, and surface them in a uniform interface.

She demonstrated a query on "information overload" keywards across 10 gigabytes of data that returned 155 hits of instances of the search words. Some were in PDF files, some in Microsoft documents, some in appointments, some in e-mail.

Those results are then sortable by date, path, or a number of other criteria.

Attendees had mixed reactions to the technology assortment on display. Several pointed out that many of the "new" technologies and themes, including Gates' "seamless computing" mantra, pen-computing and even ubiquitous search, actually harken back to past eras, not necessarily a bad thing.

The seamless computing theme, is Microsoft's attempt to answer IBM's "on demand" computing initiative, said Mark Stahlman, analyst for American Technology Research, Greenwich, Conn. "Microsoft is playing catch up," he said. "On demand is out there. It is really happening."

Kim Jones, president of Spinning Electrons, a San Francisco solution provider, was impressed by new Office 2003 perks shown off, including tight XML links to back end data. "XML totally changes the dynamic of the supply chain," he said. But, he said he already uses a tool, Enfish, that does much of what Microsoft's still-developing search purports it will do.

Pen computing as a cause celebre has come and gone several times over the past decade or more without ever reaching critical mass. Some solution providers find even the latest-and-greatest Tablet PCs underpowered and fragile. But one Comdex attendee thinks that the time has finally come for such devices.

"We're not seeing much traction in them yet but I think it'll pick up as more apps come on line," said Mike Grainger, president and COO of Ingram Micro, the large distributor. Microsoft is "the leader in the business and still proving it after 23 years."

Steven Burke, Barbara Darrow and Jeff O'Heir contributed to this report.