IDG News Service, Juan Carlos Perez, Marc Ferranti

Microsoft has released a government-specific edition of its Office 365 cloud-based email and collaboration suite that offers U.S. public-sector customers a cordoned-off data center infrastructure just for them.

Office 365 for Government hosts applications and data in a multitenant cloud reserved for U.S. government agencies, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.

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.

Facebook is revitalizing its effort to create a smartphone, recruiting engineers who have experience with mobile devices, according to a story in the New York Times Sunday.

Facebook has kept its renewed effort to come up with a smartphone quiet, avoiding putting ads on public sites, according to the article, which cited unnamed sources inside the company, people briefed by the company and people who had been the target of recruitment initiatives.

The Facebook IPO may have been a fiasco, but don't put the nail in the coffin just yet for other tech offerings this year.

The success or failure of tech company IPOs will depend on market conditions, not fallout from Facebook, analysts say.

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.

Chinese regulatory authorities have approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, paving the way for the deal to close within the week, company officials confirmed Saturday.

The companies announced last August that they had entered into an agreement for Google to acquire mobile phone and tablet maker Motorola Mobility for about US$12.5 billion.

In the latest move in a complex series of patent-related cases, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. district court late Friday to ban Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the U.S.

The Apple filing came in the wake of an appeals court ruling earlier in the week that sided with Apple on the validity of an iPad design patent. Meanwhile, Apple and Samsung are scheduled to go into court-mandated settlement negotiations, set for May 21 and May 22, so the injunction is not likely to be granted over the next few days.