IDG News Service, Juan Carlos Perez, Stephen Lawson

Research In Motion has warned that it expects an operating loss for the current quarter and has hired two investment banks to help it study alternative company strategies that might include licensing its OS.

The troubled BlackBerry maker said competitive pressures were hurting its business and that the current quarter, which ends June 2, is likely to end in a loss.

Sprint Nextel will finish shutting down its narrowband iDEN network as early as June 30, 2013, the company disclosed on Tuesday.

The iDEN system is the infrastructure that serves Sprint's Nextel brand and its popular push-to-talk service, which date back to before Sprint acquired Nextel in 2005. But the by-now archaic data speeds of the technology and the costs of maintaining two totally separate networks, sounded the death knell for iDEN as far back as the merger deal's announcement in 2004.

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.

Cisco Systems owned up to some miscalculations in its video collaboration strategy but showed off some promising future capabilities in a briefing with media this week.

The company's video meeting business is best known for its TelePresence Meeting Systems, especially the high-profile three-screen meeting rooms that include Cisco-designed furniture and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Cisco is now looking beyond those swanky environments toward mobile devices that can bring video meetings to participants wherever they are.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved a rule change for part of the 800MHz band at a meeting on Thursday, opening the door for Sprint Nextel to use the band for its 4G LTE network.

Sprint has frequencies in the 800MHz SMR (Specialized Mobile Radio) band that so far have been dedicated to the iDEN network, which delivers the narrowband 2G service that Sprint acquired by buying Nextel in 2005. When the FCC carried out a rebanding project several years ago to eliminate interference between iDEN and public safety radios, it decided that services on those frequencies couldn't use channels wider than 25KHz. That channel width can't support anything more than a narrowband service such as iDEN, which delivers average throughput of 20Kbps (bits per second) to 30Kbps.

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.

Verizon Communications on Tuesday became the first service provider to say it will use Alcatel-Lucent's upcoming 7950 XRS core routing system, which will bring the French-American equipment vendor into the carrier core routing business for the first time in about a decade.

Alcatel announced the 7950 XRS (Extensible Routing System) at an event at its Santa Clara, California, campus on Tuesday. It will be offered in three versions, which will accommodate between 32 and 160 100Gbps (bit-per-second) ports. The first of those will begin shipping in the third quarter this year. Ihab Tarazi, vice president of Global IP (Internet Protocol) and Transport Planning and Technology at Verizon, spoke at the event, which was webcast.

EMC has acquired Syncplicity, an enterprise file-management service provider, for an undisclosed sum.

The privately-held company offers cloud-based file management that lets enterprise users securely access and synchronize files and use applications on a variety of devices. EMC will bring Syncplicity into its Information Intelligence Group portfolio, according to a press release.