Microsoft just released a free accounting tool for Windows users: Office Accounting Express 2007.  Aimed at small and home-based businesses and available at IdeaWins.com, OAE offers the following features:

• Create quotes and invoices; track expenses and employee time
• Enter data once and share it seamlessly with other Microsoft Office system programs
• Manage payroll and taxes with ADP’s integrated payroll service
• List items on eBay, track sales activity, and download and process orders
• Email invoices and get paid faster with PayPal
• Monitor your customers’ business credit in real-time through Equifax

MS plans to complement this release with a Professional version which will offer many more features including inventory management and Microsoft Dynamics POS integration.  The professional version will be available in January 2007 for $149.

technorati tags:office, accounting, microsoft

Google has finally begun merging their Writely & Spreadsheet services into a single collaborative environment.  As you can see from the screenshot above, the homepage of Google Docs & Spreadsheets gives you an overview of your currently active documents.  From here, you can upload a new document or spreadsheet as well as tag and share existing documents.  This marks the first time that Writely (which now redirects to docs.google.com) features have been available within the “classic” Google interface.

technorati tags:web20, writely, spreadsheets, google

Now this sounds interesting. Whilst exploring the “New Projects” page on Sourceforge, I stumbled upon a new entry that sounded quite interesting…WaxOS:

“Wax. An OS that runs windows programs, looks & feels like windows
(but ‘better’). Built from a heavily modified linux kernel, Wine, Xgl,
DirectFB, and most importantly, has not a line of X11 in it. One of its
many aim is to boot ‘instantly’.”

That’s all, folks. There’s no home page for the project, no forum discussion, no news…just that description…which just barely qualifies as a paragraph. We’ll be sure and post any updated info as it becomes available.

Update: We’ve received some updated information fromTom, the developer of the WaxOS.  Here’s what he had to say:

I’ve been developing my Operating System (in its many incarnations) for the most part of the last 6 years.

Originally it started as an OS written in assembly. I got quite far with that, booting, multi-tasking, mouse and  keyboard support, reading and displaying background images. Then I started developing in C on top of that in which I made a nice desktop composition/windowing engine.

Realizing the faults in my ways of not using the insanely detailed, complete and hardware-supporting linux kernel as a base, I have switched to that now. I can tell you that the first OS project was not a loss in any way, as having that knowledge is just so incredibly useful.

I’ll keep you guys posted on my progress.

He also writes to tell us that he’s currently in the middle of developing yet another Open Source project: an audio player by the name of BlueTunes which takes a unique 3D approach at browsing your music collection.  With support for a variety of different formats, iPod & other portable devices, and music database information powered by MusicBrainz, it will be interesting to see how this project develops.  (Tom also warns us that the current incarnation of the program is quite buggy but definitely usable.)  You can find more information at the official site or you can keep up with and/or participate in the program’s development at Google Groups.