Corporate news aggregation specialist NewsEdge has done a deal with Microsoft to deliver its service via Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook. The arrangement adds some weight to Microsoft's efforts to get Exchange accepted in major corporations by associating it with the delivery of what appears to be one of the industry's largest content piles. And there's a certain amount of coincidence in how news of the deal got out. NewsEdge aggregates and sifts news content from large numbers of sources globally, and then pushes it out as email and via the Web to its customers. These it claims include 78 of Business Week's largest global companies. So Bill Gates showed it to the heads of quite a few of those companies at his CEO Summit, which we must remind you was not a sales pitch, oh no. As far as we can gather, NewsEdge's special talent is sorting out news content so it's sufficiently tailored to individual customer's needs to induce them to part with hard cash. As we're not about to do that, we've absolutely no idea how good it is at this. But from its Q1 its numbers don't seem too terrific right now. It also has a relationship with Netscape Netcenter, which it expanded in January, so this may now be in peril, as it buddies-up to Microsoft. Content will however be an important part of Microsoft's plans to get Exchange, Outlook (and shrunken versions of the same) into next generation mobile services, so don't be at all surprised if Newsedge pops up in the grand Microsoft wireless vision Real Soon Now. ®