Test Center Tracker: Open source rules management

Rewriting the business rules: When it comes to deploying a BRMS (business rules management system), you have a couple of choices: Invest a huge chunk of change in an enterprise-level feature-rich proprietary package, or go for a highly capable open-source alternative that costs significantly less but lacks some bells and whistles. James Owen looks at two BRMSes that fall under the latter category: Jess 7.0 and JBoss Rules 3.2. “In a nutshell, Jess and JBoss Rules are best suited to smaller projects, where a rule repository and extensive reporting and debugging capabilities aren’t critical needs, and where rule development and maintenance can be entrusted to one or a few devoted programmers.” And if your hungry for more, check out his insights on rules repositories, as well some bonus material about the products.

Re-opening Office: Oliver Rist has emerged once again from his foray in Office 2007 Beta and is now talking about the newly enhanced Access and OneNote. Access in particular has undergone some significant improvements, including better-designed interfaces, as well as new embedded macros “that should really enable amateur database developers to get some high-end performance out of their work.” OneNote hasn’t changed too much, but it does boast, among other things, the ability to import a presentation slide by slide.

Seven deadly sin of virtualization security: In theory, virtualization security sounds great. It essentially uses a sand box-like environment to prevent malware from infecting or modifying your computer. But Security Adviser Roger A. Grimes has played with a number of these types of solutions and has found some common problems among them. So before you turn to virtualization to solve your security woes, check out his latest column.