Monitoring MSFT: Heartbleed Haven, Enterprise Mobility Suite, XP's End

Tough week for web sites and anyone who uses them (i.e. all of us), following the news of the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability that reportedly affected two-thirds of web sites. Security experts recommended that users wait until they get the word that a site has been patched before changing their passwords. Were Microsoft (MSFT) services affected by Heartbleed? And what else is new with the software giant in the days after XP’s end-of-support, the week after the Build conference, and as we look forward to the rest of 2014 under a new CEO. And did you hear the nasty thing one cloud CEO said about SharePoint? Here’s what’s going on with Microsoft.

The good news is Microsoft reports that its cloud platform Azure was not affected by Heartbleed. The company said that most Microsoft services were not impacted and do not use OpenSSL to terminate SSL connections. “Windows utilizes its own encryption component, named Secure Channel or SChannel, making it so that these solutions are not vulnerable to Heartbleed,” SharePoint Pro reports.

And speaking of SharePoint, did you hear the slam that one cloud CEO made about Microsoft’s collaboration platform last week? Box CEO Aaron Levie told Ingram Micro Cloud Summit attendees that his service is “Sort of like Microsoft SharePoint done right.” Ouch.

Can Microsoft’s new cloud and enterprise chief, Scott Guthrie, counter spikes like that and the sentiment behind them? All About Microsoft’s Mary Jo Foley spoke to Guthrie about his new role and his top priorities in this blog.

Windows XP Update

While Microsoft may be safe from Heartbleed, as The VAR Guy points out, Windows XP, which reached its end-of-support life last week on April 8, still hosts more than 6,000 websites around the world. No more security for them. Unless the upgrade, of course, to a new OS and maybe some new hardware, too?

PC Sales Fall Less Quickly

The end of Windows XP may get part of the credit for a slowdown in the decline of PC sales in the first quarter of this year. Shipments were down only 3 percent from the same quarter a year ago, a much smaller drop than we’ve seen in a while. The XP effect should continue for the rest of the year, and Windows IT Pro expects the dramatic fall off in PC sales to level off in the months and years ahead.

Mobility Management

Meanwhile, Microsoft strengthened its stake in the ground on enterprise mobility, bundling together Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services to create Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, intended to provide device, identity and access management with data protection from the cloud. More on that here.