IDG News Service, Joris Evers, Juan Carlos Perez

Samsung will launch this week two new Chrome OS-based computers, a laptop and desktop that have been designed to be significantly faster and more versatile than previous models.

Along with the new Samsung machines, Google is announcing enhancements to Chrome OS and Google Apps, including tight integration with Google Drive and the ability to edit Google Docs documents offline.

Microsoft is in the midst of an unprecedented, massive upgrade cycle for its enterprise software products, a refresh wave that represents a major challenge for CIOs and IT managers responsible for charting their companies' technology strategy.

Not only is Microsoft working on a major revamp of its flagship Windows operating system, but significant upgrades are coming to its Office products, the Explorer browser and a range of back-end enterprise products.

CIOs and IT directors tracking the barrage of major upgrades for Windows and Office also need to stay tuned to the refresh cycle for Microsoft's servers and tools, including Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Visual Studio 11.

The 2012 version of Windows Server, the version of Windows that runs on enterprise and data center servers, is "quite possibly the most significant release of Windows Server ever," packing hundreds of new and improved features in areas like virtualization, networking, storage, user experience and scripting, according to Microsoft.

The Executive Branch of the Minnesota state government had its 40,000 end users on a mishmash of e-mail systems when in 2008 its IT group, the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), decided to tackle the problem.

Initially, the OET consolidated the users, from about 70 state agencies and on about 40 disparate e-mail systems, onto a single e-mail platform of on-premise Exchange 2007 servers.

About 4.5 million Catholic school students will get access to Microsoft's Office 365 cloud e-mail and collaboration suite as part of a 3-year deal the software vendor struck with the Catholic International Education Office (OIEC).

The scope of the agreement could later be expanded to include all 43 million students at 210,000 Catholic schools in 102 countries, Microsoft said on Thursday.

Box will start letting customers test a new set of IT administration controls for its cloud-hosted enterprise collaboration and content management software on Thursday.

The overall goals of the new and revamped features are to improve the product's security, give IT staffers more control over users and data, and simplify administration tasks.

Technical problems at the Nasdaq exchange affected the trading of Facebook shares on Friday, the much-anticipated day of its IPO (initial public offering), Robert Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., told reporters on Sunday, according to published reports.

The problems, which centered on order cancellations, have "humbly embarrassed" Nasdaq, which as a result is not having its "finest hour," Greifeld said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) will provide email and collaboration applications to about 600,000 students via Microsoft's Live@EDU cloud suite, a project for which it also considered Google Apps for Education.

LACCD, the largest community college district in the U.S., plans to start the Live@EDU rollout in the fall, focusing initially on its current students, said LACCD CIO Jorge Mata.

Microsoft has designed Windows 8 to make parental monitoring and control of children's computer activities simpler and more effective, the company said on Monday.

In Windows 8, parents can receive a weekly report of their children's online and PC activities by creating user accounts for each child and turning on the Family Safety feature.

Microsoft has revamped the way Windows 8 monitors hard disk operations and detects problems in an effort to make the diagnostic and repair process less intrusive and disruptive, even as disk capacity continues to balloon.

The improvements in Windows 8 center on the ChkDsk utility, which inspects the hard disk and checks for a variety of errors and problems. Until now, running ChkDsk has often been inconvenient because end users have to stop using the machine while the utility runs, and the scan can take a long time to complete.

The new version of Windows Server will feature improvements in its hosting capabilities that end users can tap into remotely from a variety of client devices.

Windows Server 2012, which is in beta testing phase, will ship with enhancements to its Remote Desktop Services (RDS) component intended to improve RDS performance over WANs.

Google has developed a tool to automate the creation of custom-reporting dashboards for its Analytics website-usage tracking service, the company said on Wednesday.

The new Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library lets developers create these dashboards without the need for them to learn the ins and outs of the Analytics API (application programming interface) and manually write the code.