In other non-phone related Microsoft news...

In spite of all the focus in the past couple of days -- OK, weeks? months? -- on Microsoft's mobile strategy, the rest of the Empire hasn't come to a standstill. Here are a few items of interest about some other Microsoft products:

Microsoft releases bug fix for Office 2010 Beta 2: Microsoft made available earlier this week an update for the public Beta 2 of Office 2010 designed to fix message-size problems some testers have encountered in Outlook 2010. A February 15 blog post on the Microsoft Outlook team blog includes download links for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the update."This fix prevents future messages from consuming unnecessary space, but doesn’t resize existing messages," company officials note. There are other tools inside the Office 2010 beta to handle the latter task, they said. (Thanks to the ithinkdiff.com site for flagging this one.)

Microsoft phases out System Center Capacity Planner from its management line-up: I'd assume most enterprises running Microsoft's System Center Capacity Planner (SCPP) have gotten fair warning on this, but just in case... Microsoft is discontinuing its Capacity Planner product family. "Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) is formally being discontinued, effective immediately, as it no longer supports the current versions of Microsoft applications it was designed for," according to the Softies. There are no new versions of SCPP coming and no new or updated app capacity planning models in development. Free, mainstream support for SCPP 2007 is \available until 4/9/2013, according to the company. Microsoft has a list of other applications it suggests users employ for capacity planning in place of SCPP on TechNet. Thanks to Directions on Microsoft for a heads-up on this.)

CodePlex Foundation accepts its first independent open-source project: The Microsoft-founded CodePlex Foundation announced on February 17 that it has accepted its first community project. MVC Contrib, led by Eric Hexter and Jeffrey Palermo of Headspring, is now part of the Foundation's ASP.NET Open Source Gallery. Based on Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC Framework, MVC Contrib "is useful for developers looking to develop and test UI elements on top of the ASP.NET MVC framework," the Foundation officials say.

Microsoft to fix its disappearing ZunePass music problem?: Maybe this explains why my e-mails haven't even merited a no comment. I've been asking Microsoft about the fact that music and artists that have been disappearing from ZunePass accounts." News.com has a report today  that Microsoft has hired an outside firm to help clear music for its music subscription service. Music Reports Inc. has forged a deal with Microsoft to "administer the music publishing licensing and royalty accounting for the Zune Pass subscription service in the United States."