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Microsoft has announced at the Microsoft Hosting Summit in Bellevue, Washington that it is making several enhancements to its Microsoft Services Provider Licensing Agreement program.

The company has introduced a new volume licensing plan that will make it easier for customers to move over to the cloud.

Referred to as license mobility, the changes give customers greater flexibility to deploy application servers on-premises or hosted by service providers in the cloud.

The company will also introduce a new Core Infrastructure Suite, which will include Windows Server Datacenter, System Center Server Management Suite Datacenter and Forefront Endpoint Protection, in the SPLA program to make it more affordable to license infrastructure at their data centers.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson, the new licensing option “enhances business opportunities by paving the way for qualified Microsoft customers to take advantage of cloud computing without having to bear the economic burden for products that they already own and have covered through Software Assurance.”

Microsoft is changing their Volume Licensing Mobility plan. Under the new plan, which goes into effect in July, volume licensing customers will be able to deploy their application server licenses to the cloud without any additional purchase requirements. This is great news for, well, just about everyone.

he new licensing plan applies to SQL Server, Exchange Server, Lync Server, SharePoint Server, System Center servers and Dynamics CRM. But it does not apply to Windows and Windows Server, because the operating system remains tied to the hardware platform, as well as desktop applications and development tools.

The RIM Playbook, that challenger to the tablet throne currently occupied by the iPad, has announced that it is heading straight to the workplace, thanks to help provided by Microsoft.

The tablet device will sync with the version of Exchange Server behind Microsoft’s forthcoming Office 365 cloud suite, the company has announced. Microsoft has not given a date for Office 365, the successor to Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), but experts predict it will launch in July.

Alec Taylor, RIM vice president of software services and enterprise marketing, said: “I now have ability to consume and use Office 356 information on my PlayBook.”

The kind folks over at WindowsITPro have conducted a fascinating interview with Microsoft’s own Ankur Kothari. The interview is a double treat for you Exchange users out there as it tackles a topic that is not often discussed: Personal archives within the Exchange infrastructure.

It a fascinating read and touches on the history of Exchange 2010 as well. The ups, the downs, the mostly ups. You get the point. Check it out here and bring your reading glasses as it is fairly long.

Wayne Snyder, noted Microsoft SQL Server Expert, Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP), and Mariner Distinguished Architect, has partnered with LearnKey, a global provider of technology based training solutions to produce new training sessions.

His SQL Server online training video entitled, “SQL Server 2008 Implementation and Maintenance.” LearnKey will highlight the course in a webinar Wednesday, March 23rd at 1 p.m. ET.

“Wayne provides a level of expertise that brings tremendous value to our customized training solutions,” said Melissa Miller, Marketing Manager at LearnKey.

“The LearnKey videos provide a platform for me to share – on a very broad level – what I’ve learned over the course of my career and more importantly, how to stay on top of the latest technology,” said Snyder. “LearnKey’s segments help developers quickly grasp what is necessary to understand the technology, to attain certifications that may help them reach career goals and to make the technology work for their organizations.”

Google’s Message Continuity service will now support Microsoft Exchange 2010 Servers, the company announced recently. The Postini-based email continuity service launched late last year for Exchange 2003 and 2007. Support has now been added to the newest child in the Exchange family, Exchange 2010.

Google’s service enabled Exchange accounts to be synchronised to record sent and received messages, deletions and folder changes during an outage.

Pricing for the service was set at US$25 per user per year or an additional US$12 per user per month for existing Apps customers.

Microsoft and Athenahealth have announced a partnership to connect Athenahealth’s cloud-based EHR and practice management software with Microsoft’s Amalga enterprise health intelligence system.

The collaborative projects are due to be completed by the second half of 2011, and are expected to eventually create a path for other healthcare providers to use Amalga to push data from an assortment of disparate clinical systems, including ambulatory and in-patient data, into patients’ HealthVault personal e-health records.

In a move taken from AOL’s 1994 playbook, Microsoft will begin offering free trial of Azure to qualified customers. The free trials have already begun, so what are you waiting for?

“This extended free trial will allow developers to try out the Windows Azure platform without the need for up-front investment costs,” a Microsoft blog entry explained.

Participants of the free trial can choose one of two options: 750 hours of use on an Extra Small Compute Instance, or 25 hours on a Small Compute Instance. An Extra Small Compute Instance offers the equivalent of a 1GHz processor with 768MB of working memory, which normally costs $.05 an hour. The Small Compute Instance has a 1.6GHz processor, 1.75GB of working memory, and typically costs $0.12 an hour.

According to BlackBerry’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server Add-on product website, support for Microsoft Lync is forthcoming. In the footnotes it says “Support for Microsoft Lync Server will be available in an upcoming BlackBerry Enterprise Server Service Pack.”

It will be released as part of BES 5.0.3 which is still in beta. BES 5.0.3 was expected to be released in Q4 last year, so 5.0.3 should be released any day now. Well, um, hopefully.

Here are some features that should be included in the pack.

• Support for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Lync Server 2010
• Support for Microsoft Office 2010 file attachments
• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtualization platform