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Windows Operating Systems, whether installed on server or client computers in a network, benefit from having security patches applied on a regular basis.  It is far from true that Windows computers, including servers, can be configured once and continue to function seamlessly thereafter.  To remedy this, Microsoft regularly releases software patches for its systems.  These small modules are designed to be installed into an existing OS configuration, and to repair elements of the operating system on an ongoing basis.

Businesses that have wanted to widely adopt a tablet-based computing infrastructure have been somewhat stymied to date by the lack of a Microsoft Office app for the most popular tablet in the world: the iPad produced by Apple Computers.  That bar to adoption is now slated to vanish; according to released reports, a Microsoft Office app designed to run on the iPad will soon be launched.  The app is expected to include the popular Office components of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  There is no word as of yet whether other Office family programs such as Access, FrontPage, or Publisher will also be released in iPad app form. 

When it comes to Windows 7, a platform increasingly being used in business and industry in preference to older forms of Windows, the OS comes with many efficiency features that will make the transition worthwhile.

Anyone who has worked extensively in Microsoft Office products such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel may well have encountered the huge advantage to be garnered from recording and using macros.  These are small programs that can be executed from within Office applications in order to automate tasks that are performed on a frequent basis.  One possible use of a macro, for example, is to take a text file created by a non-Microsoft application and strip it of extraneous data so that its contents can be easily transferred into a spreadsheet or other program.

Windows 7 is a Microsoft operating system that can be used on physical desktops but can also be implemented as part of a virtualized computing environment. 

Before Exchange 2010 was released, networked users of Microsoft workstations had fewer options for the creation of email archives.  The most typical method used was moving email into Microsoft Outlook and creating personal archives using its functionality. 

Windows Server 8 is slated to be the most impressive leap forward from Microsoft's server platforms in a long while.  New features of the platform were recently revealed to the public at the BUILD Conference.  While some of these have been discussed in previous pre-release blogs and announcements, others came as a welcome surprise to conference participants and attendees. 

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and later offer a feature known as "automatic failover" designed to help guarantee database stability.  Automatic failover is useful in situations in which information in the primary or main database becomes unavailable for some reason.  In these cases, the automatic failover feature causes the secondary or mirror server to function as the primary server until primary server function can be restored. 

Cloud technologies are becoming more familiar to business users thanks to the widespread use of remote applications such as Gmail and Google Docs.  Less familiar to some users is the SharePoint system, first released by Microsoft in 2001 to provide, as the name suggests, shared access to centrally located data that resides on a central server.  SharePoint can be installed as a separate service or can be implemented as part of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite or as part of the new Office 365 platform.