In one instance, a hospital in Washington, D.C., asked Microsoft to examine its medical records to determine why certain patients were getting sick soon after being discharged. The company crunched the data from MedStar Washington Hospital Center and found something surprising: Patients who stayed in the same room had come down with the same infection.

“There was a bug in the room — people were getting infected,” Scott Charney, vice president of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, said recently at a security conference. Such infections are often caused by bacteria on medical instruments or furniture.

As hospitals digitize patient records and amass huge amounts of data, many are relying on companies such as Microsoft, SAS Institute Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp., whose data-mining technologies can help them detect patterns and improve medical care.

via Data-Mining in Doctor’s Office Helps Solve Medical Mysteries – Bloomberg.

With its “most significant” Bing update ever, is Microsoft the first to get “social search” right? Read on to find out.

via With new Bing, is Microsoft the first to get ‘social search’ right? – The Washington Post.

After Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive — the two largest online storage services on the Web — Google was late to the party by a number of years. While Google needed no advertising to drum up support, what may hold back uptake is that as per the terms and conditions of using the product, the files you upload to the Google Drive product undergoes a rights transition.

A quick analysis of Google’s terms of service shows how the search company owns the files you upload the minute they are submitted, and can in effect do anything it wants to your files — and that’s final. But there is a small catch.

via Who owns your files on Google Drive? | Internet & Media – CNET News.

The subsidiary, called Microsoft Open Technologies Inc., is being announced today. It will be formed from company’s Interoperability Strategy team, and led by Microsoft executive Jean Paoli as the subsidiary’s president.

About 50 to 75 people will be part of the subsidiary to start.

It’s a surprise twist in Microsoft’s relationship with the open-source world. After a contentious history, the company has been participating more broadly in open-source projects in recent years, as reflected by its newfound status as one of the top 20 contributors to the Linux kernel.

via Microsoft forms new subsidiary for open source, standards – GeekWire.

Windows XP and the business productivity suite Office 2003 both exit all support on April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a Monday blog post.

On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for XP and Office 2003.

XP went on sale in October 2001 while Office 2003 launched October 2003.

“Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases for their time, but the technology environment has shifted,” argued Stella Chernyak, a Microsoft marketing director.

via Microsoft starts XP retirement countdown – Computerworld.

“The agreement with Microsoft represents the culmination of a robust auction process for our patent portfolio,” said AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong.

The deal comes as the race for patents has heated up in the tech space. Among other recent deals, Google Inc. GOOG -0.45% agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. MMI -0.32% last year for about $12.5 billion, partly to secure its lucrative patent portfolio, and a number of bidders pursued Nortel Networks Corp.’s patents at auction as well.

via AOL to Sell Patents to Microsoft for $1.1 Billion – WSJ.com.

A customer described the problem to The Register as an “admin nightmare” and said they couldn’t understand how such an important system could go down.

“This should never happen,” said our source. “The system should be redundant and outages should be confined to some data centres only.”

Azure customers can at least take some comfort from how informative Microsoft has been, keeping them updated via the platform’s online service page at least every hour.*

The service management system first began to have problems at 1.45am GMT (5.45pm PST), according to the page.

“We are experiencing an issue with Windows Azure service management. Customers will not be able to carry out service management operations,” Microsoft said, adding that it was investigating the problem.

via Microsoft’s Azure cloud down and out for 8 hours • The Register.

Motorola Mobility is violating a pledge to license industry-standard patents on fair terms and “demanding that Microsoft take its products off the market,” Microsoft said in a blog post. Apple Inc. has also filed a complaint to the European Union over Motorola Mobility’s licensing terms.

via Microsoft Files EU Antitrust Claim Against Motorola Mobility – BusinessWeek.

On Tuesday, the blog reported that its sources say that an Microsoft app that will include Office programs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will soon be submitted to the Apple App Store. The blog first noted the existence of an iPad version of the Microsoft Office Suite in November.

The Daily said that it’s had some hands-on experience with the new app. The user interface is supposedly similar to the current OneNote app. There is also some resemblance to Metro, the new design language used on Windows Phone and the soon to be released Windows 8 desktop operating system.

The Daily said that Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be supported and users will be able to create and edit these documents locally or online. But the blog said it’s unclear if other Office apps will be supported.

via Microsoft Office app coming to iPad? | Signal Strength – CNET News.

Microsoft, like rivals Google, Amazon and others, is racing to bring its cloud software into compliance with government security regulations. Earlier this year Microsoft and Google became embroiled in a dispute over whose cloud software complied with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements.

Meeting such requirements can be critical for winning government contracts, such as the $60 million deal to provide the U.S. Department of the Interior with e-mail and collaboration cloud software that Google (NSDQ:GOOG) and Microsoft spent much of the year fighting over in court.

Microsoft also said it has overhauled its Office 365 Trust Center, a Web site that provides detailed information about Office 365 privacy and security practices, to make it easier to use.

Microsoft said it would sign the European Union’s contractual clauses, which the vendor said would help customers comply with the EU’s stringent Data Protection Directive regulations. The contractual or “model clauses” legitimize the transfer of personal data through international networks to locations outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

via Microsoft Boosts Office 365 Security To Meet European Data Protection Requirements.