Reuters reports that Microsoft offers now a pay-as-you-go model for Office 2007 in South Africa. First-time users can buy a three-month subscription for $28.54. The official justification for this move is that software becomes affordable for customers in the emerging markets this way. However, I have doubts that this is the real motive.

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Active Directory Explorer v1.0 is a free new Sysinternals tool from Microsoft. It allows you to view and edit the Active Directory database. The utility is similar to ADSIedit from the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools. It offers two useful additional features: You can create snapshots and you can bookmark AD objects.

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You might have noticed that I have the honor of being a member of Tech Dispenser, “Computerworld’s human powered technology blog network and news aggregator”. I recommend checking out their site. You’ll find many great computer related blogs there. You might also consider subscribing to some of their category feeds. Those articles are hand selected by Computerworld editors. Thus, you’ll find many interesting stuff there.

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Do you get stomach ache whenever you think about the complaints you will hear from your colleagues after upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007? I think the new Office user interface is really great! But I am sure you also have these people in your organization who hate any kind of change. And this change is really big! There are two Office add-ins that might be of help to your stomach problem. One is Classic Menu for Office 2007 and the other goes for the name “Toolbar Toggle“.

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Microsoft new malware database is online now. Such a virus encyclopedia is quite useful if one of your machines gets infected by a virus and your antivirus software is not able to get it under control. You can then search for technical background information and ways to get rid of the pest. It is advisable not to rely on just one virus database, though.

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Microsoft has released Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 2.0. This free tool allows big companies to acquire information of whether their desktop computers are ready for Windows Vista.

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It is now official! Windows Server 2008 will be launched on February 27th. Joe Wilcox is speculating that the RTM might become available in November. If you didn’t start yet with exploring Microsoft’s new server OS, now might be the right time to so.

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VMRCplus is a free new Microsoft tool for Virtual Server 2005 R2. It allows you to configure Virtual Server and to manage virtual machines with a real (graphical) interface. Today, I had a quick look at this nifty tool.

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Mary Jo Foley obviously has good contacts in Microsoft. She already knows that the beta of Vista’s service pack 1 is about to launch in mid-July. Vista SP1 RTM might be released in November 2007. This is certainly much earlier than many have expected.

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Virtualization.info reports that there will be a session about VMware Infrastructure VMware Server 2.0 at VMware World 2007 where they also will discuss some of the new features of VMware Server 2.

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