Microsoft makes apps portable - except its own

Microsoft is to co-operate in developing the second generation of the U3 " portable program" technology to allow you to run your favourite applications from a flash drive – except, apparently, its own.

A spokesman in the US said it has no plans yet to U3-enable is Office 2007, a move that would require major changes to product activation. He added: "It is too early to say what we will be doing in the future with the technology."

Microsoft is teaming up with U3 pioneer Sandisk with the main aim of developing a platform providing secure access to email, browsers and what are described as "productivity tools".

Sandisk spokesman Mike Langberg said Microsoft would develop the software and his own company would develop a hardware-based security module called Trusted Flash to create a platform that will supersede U3.

"The aim is to enable companies to feel safe about entrusting their data to these drives," he said.

U3 exploits the fact that Flash memory is getting cheap and capacious enough to carry even big applications suites, allowing you to carry your working environment around on a USB stick rather than a portable computer.

Most applications need to be tweaked to run on U3 flash drives because they expect to find configuration information in the system registry. The open-source Office.org suite has been U3-enabled but products like Microsoft Office demand product activation, which locks the code to a particular PC.

Potentially U3 offers a new way of selling software effectively pre-installed, so that you simply plug your program in. But it would not necessarily be a welcome move.

Currently major products are licensed for one installation on a desktop and one on a laptop, with no restriction on using both at once. U3 would give vendors a way of offering the same portability but locking people into single use only.