In brief: Microsoft starts up RFID council

Plus: Ipswitch beefs up anti-spam filtering in mail server.

Microsoftthis month will hold the first meeting of a new council it formed to address radio frequency identification opportunities. The Microsoft RFID Council will consist of end users and hardware and software vendors buildingRFIDsystems on Microsoft’s platform.

Manufacturers, distributors and retailers are eyeing RFID as a means to better track and manage inventory as it passes through supply chains.

And vendors such as Microsoft are looking for ways to make their products part of systems for collecting, managing and integrating RFID data. Participating vendors include Accenture, GlobeRanger, HighJump Software, Intermec Technologies, Manhattan Associates and Provia Software. Microsoft also announced last week that it joinedEPCglobal, an organization driving the development of standards for RFID technologies.

Ipswitch last week added more anti-spam filtering mechanisms to its IMail Server. New are Word Normalization, which removes creative punctuation such as spaces between letters before mail is filtered, and Advanced White List filtering, which uses trusted addresses and domains to reduce false positives.

The company also added Single Message Identification, which helps track messages, and Single Line Modification, which flags a message as spam.

The new filtering technologies are available as a free download from www.ipswitch.com.