Most people develop acne when they become socially aware. Firefox just gets an add-on. Mozilla Contacts is an experimental new add-on for the browser that provides one-click access to your address books, provided that you've synchronized them.

Right now, the add-on has fairly limited features and functionality. It can sync contacts from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. Mac users can also sync with with local address books, and there are plans to incorporate Thunderbird, locally stored contacts in Windows and other social-networking systems.

Once installed, Contacts can be accessed only from your Tools menu. It opens up a new tab that's limited to entering in user accounts, although helpfully it already has a button for wiping that data. Your contacts list can be viewed in list or icon mode and will default to Twitter avatars as it merges contact data.

Currently, you have to give a site permission to use the data from Contacts, but some popular sites are supported. These include Flickr, Amazon, Yelp, and Gravatar. The add-on will automatically discover Webfinger and HCard data, and if you're looking at a contact in list view there's a search button that should search the Web for information about that person. This feature wasn't working for me, but it's a good idea.

Mozilla Contacts is fun to play with, but unless you're an early adopter there's not a lot here just yet to excite the average user. It is good to see that Mozilla is addressing a potentially killer feature in Google, given the easy ties between Chrome and Gmail.

Microsoft has said that, starting with Office 2010, it will allow computer makers to bundle in a limited version of the product onto new PCs. However Microsoft has shared relatively little about Office Starter 2010, the product that will replace Works at the low-end of Microsoft's productivity lineup.

Over lunch on Wednesday, Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft, shared a little more about what users can expect when they open up Office Starter.

As previously detailed, the product includes scaled-down versions of Word and Excel and is free for consumers, but does include advertising. Capossela said that the ads will change every 45 seconds, but for the foreseeable future the pitches will all be for Office itself. The ads will never be based on the content of one's document, he said.

"There's no scanning of the document," he said, a clear dig at rival Google. Instead the ads will say things like "Don't you miss PowerPoint" and encourage people to upgrade.

As for what users can do with the applications, Capossela said that Word will be capable of opening and displaying even the most complex documents. However, Office Starter users won't be able to use macros, create automated tables of contents, or add comments, though they will see comments added by others.

The approach with Excel is similar, with users able to view and edit documents, but not create their own pivot tables and pivot charts, for example.

Those who want more features--or to use of PowerPoint--will have to upgrade to a paid version of the product. Microsoft is also trying to ease that process, including all the code for Office 2010 on new PCs and allowing the other programs and features to be unlocked through the purchase of a new product key card.

The software maker envisions that over a short time more than 80 percent of new PCs will have Office Starter, though Capossela said on Wednesday that it will be up to computer makers how quickly PCs sold at retail have that product, as opposed to the current combination of Works and a trial version of Office 2007. He said that some PCs with the older software will probably be on shelves through the fall.

Microsoft is making a big bet with Office Starter. Although the company got comparatively little revenue from Works, which Office Starter replaces, the danger is that some users that would have paid for Office will settle for either Starter, the free browser-based Office Web Apps, or some combination of the two.

The company has been exploring the idea of an ad-funded productivity suite for years and did quietly introduce an ad-funded version of Works.

I'll have much more from my lunch with Capossela in a follow-up post Thursday morning.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

Parallels, the company best known for a product that lets Apple users run Windows side by side with Mac OS X, thinks it has found another good use for its virtualization technology.

The company has quietly been working on a product that uses virtualization to ease the sometimes painful upgrade process going from Windows XP to Windows 7, CNET has learned. The new product, which will work for both those upgrading an existing machine to Windows 7 or those buying a new PC, uses virtualization to ensure that older programs can smoothly run on the new operating system.

The product is expected to be introduced shortly and available in the coming weeks, according to a source.

Virtualization has emerged as a key technology for easily moving between operating systems, whether its going from one version of an operating system to another or running multiple operating systems side by side. Most of the dollars and interest is on the corporate side, where virtualization can help companies save significant costs.

Although virtualization for its own sake is of interest only to the geekiest of consumers, even the mainstream has gravitated to the technology when it solves a particular problem, much as Parallels' original Windows-on-Mac program did. And Parallels may just have found another interesting niche.

Windows has tools for moving data to a new Windows 7 PC, but the Windows Easy Transfer feature requires that applications be reinstalled. LapLink already has a product on the market that allows programs and data to both be moved, but doesn't deal with what to do when the programs themselves aren't compatible with Windows 7.

Parallels rival VMware has been using the shift to Windows 7 as a chance to sell businesses on the advantages of virtualization.

"It's a forcing factor, a key trigger event for customers to look at virtualization," VMware product marketing director Raj Mallempati said in an interview this week. On the corporate side, Mallempati said virtualization can help businesses cut their migration costs in half.

Mallempati said the savings come when businesses don't go through the hassle of trying to rewrite incompatible applications unless they have to, using virtualization wherever possible. Even more savings in ongoing operating costs, he said, can be had by virtualizing the typical worker's entire desktop. That has the added benefit of letting workers access their computing experience from home and on the road--though it does require consistent access to an Internet connection.

Application virtualization, meanwhile, allows individual programs to be packaged up along with the older operating system components they require and then run within their own bubble, of sorts, on the new operating system.

There are some upfront costs, Mallempati acknowledges, including storage and server costs as well as the virtualization software itself (VMware's ThinApp starts at $5,000, for example).

Mallempati said the company has already seen some pickup in virtualization sales directly attributable to Windows 7 migrations, but said he expects a further boost as companies move from the testing phase to full-scale deployments.

"It's still early," Mallempati said. "Our belief is that once Service Pack 1 comes out--around the September or October time frame--that's when we'll see broad scale migration."

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

Microsoft on Wednesday announced the first details of a planned service pack to Exchange Server 2010, which will add several new features to the messaging and calendar server software.

In addition to the usual crop of tweaks and fixes, Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010 will allow for better archiving and discovery of mail, improvements to Outlook Web Access, and better management capabilities, among other features.

Microsoft plans to make available a beta of the service pack in June with the final version due out later this year.

The improvements to Outlook Web Access bring back themes and the ability to move the reading pane, and also include performance enhancements like pre-fetching message content and allowing a user to do other things during time-consuming tasks like attaching a large file. On the archiving and discovery front, the update will allow improved multi-mailbox search as well as the creation of "retention policy tags" to better automate the deletion and archiving of data.

"Many of the improvements we are delivering in the SP1 are in direct response to the feedback you've provided since (the product was released)," Microsoft's Michael Atalla said in a blog posting. "I am excited about how, in a very short period time, we've been able to quickly respond and introduce these improvements and innovation to Exchange 2010."

Microsoft finalized Exchanger Server 2010 last October and released the product in the fall. Among other things, Exchange 2010 added support for a "mute" button that allows users to ignore a particular conversation thread. Here's a video I did last fall with Rajesh Jha talking about Exchange 2010--then code-named Exchange "14."

Originally posted at Beyond Binary