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Business rules management and systems optimization software vendor Ilog has launched an online community for developers of rich internet applications to increase the number of developers taking advantage of the latest RIA visualization tools and technologies.

Microsoft has announced the appointment of former Motorola executive Simon Leung as corporate vice president, chairman, and chief executive of its operations in China.

IT services vendor CSC has announced the appointment of Jim Foster as vice president of marketing and strategy at its Property and Casualty, P&C, Insurance division in the Americas.

IT services company Zycron has won a five-year $30m contract from the State of Tennessee to provide software development services, installations, implementations, and hardware configuration.

OPTUS is defying economic naysayers with an aggressive retail expansion plan to set up about 100 new stores in 24 months.

THE Federal Court has delayed rules to introduce new technology that could slash millions of dollars from litigation bills.

NAB staff say management is not disclosing its offshoring intentions, with the bank already deciding how many jobs will be offshored.

MICROSOFT has turned to zero per cent financing for some business software in an attempt to jump-start sales.

In five years, Microsoft expects half of all enterprise employees with e-mail to use a combined online and premises-based system like the company's Exchange Online, an executive said Monday at a launch event for that software and the SharePoint Online hosted collaboration application.About 500,000 users have already adopted Exchange Online since a limited release for large enterprises in October 2007, said Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, at the event in San Francisco. That release made the two applications available, on dedicated Microsoft servers, to enterprises with 5,000 or more employees. Starting Monday, the services are available to all small, medium-sized and large organizations in the U.S., hosted on shared resources at Microsoft. They can be purchased online or through partners. The offering had been available previously in a beta test.[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]Though the hosted applications hav

In a new lawsuit, Microsoft asks a San Francisco court to declare invalid several patents assigned to an online transactions company in hopes of defending customers who have been sued by the patent holder, WebXchange.WebXchange earlier this year filed lawsuits against Dell, Allstate and FedEx in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, charging patent infringement. The suits, filed on the same day in March, say that the companies violate WebXchange patents in some of their online services. In the FedEx suit, for example, WebXchange alleges that FedEx violates three of its patents in an online system that lets people send print jobs to Kinko's stores.[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]Microsoft is not mentioned in any of the three complaints. However, in the suit that Microsoft filed against WebXchange, it says that the charges relate to the companies' use of Microsoft's Visual St