Speaking at the Microsoft Windows Eastern Mediterranean Partner Conference 2006, Microsoft Malta Business Development manager, Pierre Mallia announced the immediate availability of the final beta versions of Windows Vista™, the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

At the conference, Microsoft provided its partners with a series of sessions and workshops designed to help them deliver prospective solutions to their customer based on their next generation platform. Microsoft also introduced its “Partner Acceleration Program”, a training and education initiative to have new IT professionals certified in Microsoft sales and technical sets to bring more talent to partners.

“Companies today are moving away from custom developing software applications to reduce costs and increase system stability and reliability. On the other hand, our customers are starting to demand more and more features, which drives the cost of building these applications higher and increases the total cost of ownership from a customer’s perspective. Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System provides a great platform for building these solutions at lower costs with increased stability and reliability by providing a solid set of features like document management, business intelligence and project management right out of the box,” said François Grech, director of Exigy Ltd and conference participant.

Windows VistaTM, the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and Exchange 2007 are designed to help businesses empower their people to manage waves of information and contribute to bottom-line success in four key areas:

• Simplifying how people work together. Wherever people work in an organisation, these three products will make it easier for them to communicate and work together in teams and with their external customers and partners. The products include collaboration capabilities that enable workers to more easily share, access and synchronise information and documents across a wide range of devices.

• Enabling better content protection and management. Windows VistaTM, the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and Windows Server “Longhorn” are designed to streamline everyday business processes and compliance procedures that slow people down. The products include capabilities that enable better protection and retention of user and system data, as well as improved application of compliance policies and business process integration with critical business systems.

• Finding information and improving business insight. Windows VistaTM, the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and Windows Server “Longhorn” enable people across organisations to have faster, easier access to critical information and the tools that help them obtain better insight from this information. The products include new tools for finding information across a range of applications, on desktop PCs and on mobile devices, while also extending business insight with new business intelligence tools.

• Reducing IT costs and improving security. Windows VistaTM, the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and Windows Server “Longhorn” cut down deployment and management costs and complexity by reducing security risks and simplifying the deployment process.

The products include

capabilities that help IT professionals better manage operations, while

also delivering enhanced protection from Web-based malicious software and fraudulent e-mail messages. In addition, the products include capabilities that enable companies to deploy a single operating system image, and streamline the deployment and customisation of software updates.