Despite of the small delay that was just announced for Microsoft's next-generation Office suite, news from the software giant's camp have kept coming strong, and this time it's not only about Vista.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 is now available for download, and according to Microsoft includes improvements in reliability, compatibility, user features, and security. Reportedly slight changes have been made to the look and feel of the browser, tabs now support drag & drop, RSS has been improved along with website compatibility. Finally, Beta 3 contains all the security fixes addressed in the June Internet Explorer Security Bulletin MS06-021.

You should also be aware that end of support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 will be made effective October 10, 2006. After this date, Microsoft will no longer provide any incident support or security updates. We obviously recommend you upgrade to Service Pack 2 (SP2) as soon as possible, not only because of patch support but because it is by far less vulnerable.

Finally, Microsoft today released the first technology preview of Expression Web Designer, which is available for download to everyone. At a glance this seems to be a brought-up-to-date version of Frontpage, as it does not simply act as a WYSIWYG editor, but appears to carry a more robust foundation to create dynamic webpages using CSS. I know I will be giving this a try since I'm still one of those creating web layouts using tables, shame on me.