Opinion

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Managing content in a rich media world

IT is finding new solutions for indexing, searching, and accessing libraries of A/V content

By Dan Goodin

Jan 8, 2007 9 mins

Data Management Small and Medium Business Technology Industry

Budgeting for SOA success

Invest in training, security, and emerging technologies to ensure long-term SOA results

By David Linthicum

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Getting data asset management right

A clear vision and metadata based on open standards are two keys to success

By Dan Goodin

Data and Information Security Small and Medium Business Technology Industry

Agile scripting: Bigger bang for app-dev bucks

Mashups and SOA are fueling a shift toward scripting and agility — invest in skill sets accordingly

By Alan Zeichick

Application Integration Small and Medium Business Technology Industry

Capitalize on emerging collaboration options

Foregoing licenses in favor of emerging alternatives will free funds to train employees to collaborate effectively

By Phillip Windley

Databases Small and Medium Business Software Development

Pay to protect your data or pay the consequences

Shifting your focus to information protection is this year's safest security bet

By Roger Grimes

Data and Information Security Patch Management Software Technology Industry

Weighing the cost of compliance

Certain to spend too much adhering to regulations this year, IT may be putting the enterprise at risk

By Roger Grimes

Careers Security Technology Industry

Test Center Tracker: Something wiki this way comes

Wading through wikis: Wikis have gained momentum as media for sharing information. Part of the credit for that might go to Wikipedia for demonstrating the technology's potential, but vendors have been hard at work priming their wiki wares to enh

By Ted Samson

Jan 8, 2007 1 min

NYT warns against running Windows

A bit of technical advice appearing in the Sunday New York Times likely has elicited snickers from members of the Apple and Linux community and moans of displeasure from Windows users and just about everyone at Microsoft. That bit of advice, found in

By Ted Samson

Disagreement on a style of management, or a disagreeable style of management?

Dear Bob …PowerPoint tips?  Geezzeee Bob, material must be getting thin.How about "How to deal with a manager who can't spell Internet, but is promoted to be the Director of Internet Communications?"  Or, &

By Bob Lewis

Jan 7, 2007 4 mins

Microsoft Ships Virtual PC 2007 RC

Microsoft finally made the much anticipated release of Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate available, but with little fanfare. The announcement keeps the product on track for a final shipment in the first quarter. New features found in the release incl

Amazon Tries Hand at Virtual Appliances

A virtual appliance by any other name is still, well, a virtual appliance. Sometime back around June of 2005, VMware popularized the notion of creating a virtual machine package and calling it a "virtual appliance". The idea quickly grew le

OpenVZ Virtualization Software and Sun UltraSPARC

The OpenVZ project has announced its open source virtualization software is available for servers using Sun's UltraSPARC T1 CoolThreads processor. The operating system-level server virtualization software technology helps increase server utiliza

Are you Building a JBOWS or a True SOA?

I enjoyed Joe McKendrick's blog where he sited a current study by Saugatuck Technology research that points out that SOA is still evolving, and that it's going to take a few years before the true value of SOA is a reality for most enterpris

By Dave Linthicum

Parallels Desktop for Mac Reaches Beta 3

Parallels is operating at light speed in anticipation of the fast approaching Macworld 2007 Conference and Expo taking place in San Francisco. Only two weeks ago, the company announced Beta 2 of a new and improved version of its Desktop for Mac produ

Jan 6, 2007 2 mins

Xen Updates to Version 3.0.4

For those of you that might have missed the news, Xen has been updated with the official minor release to version 3.0.4. It is described as a largely opportunistic stabilizing release for HardwareVirtualMachine (HVM) guests due to the large amount of

Jan 6, 2007 1 min

More PowerPoint discussion

Dear Bob …I'm responding to your December 11th Keep the Joint Running ("Presenting smarter"). Very little irritates me more than the misuse of PowerPoint presentations. Many less than persuasive people take your point about each slid

By Bob Lewis

Jan 6, 2007 2 mins

Technology versus privacy: finding the right balance

All technologies that in one way or another invade your privacy rest on the premise that the benefits of such breaches outweigh the demerits. While this argument is often used to defend government snooping it is obviously also acceptable in private e

Jan 5, 2007 3 mins

Visual Studio 2005 SP1: Good news, bad news

Spurred largely by a blog post by Brad Abrams, I installed Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005. First, the good news: it seems to fix all the bugs I know about, and adds support for ASP.NET AJAX and (in a separate update) Windows Vista. The bad new

By Martin Heller

Jan 5, 2007 2 mins

Why the Government could Lead Us to the SOA Promised Land

What? The US Government leading technology? Not sure that makes sense right? Wrong. In working on a few projects, both commercial and government, I've come to the conclusion that many of the government organizations are both bullish on SOA, and

By Dave Linthicum

Jan 5, 2007 2 mins

Test Center Tracker: See VMware run!

VMware 3 in action: Not long ago, the InfoWorld Test Center had a chance to take a deep dive into the new VMWare Infrastructure 3. Analyst Paul Venezia deemed it excellent, but we have some good news for the healthy skeptics out there who subscribe t

By Ted Samson

Jan 5, 2007 1 min

Careers Security Technology Industry

Getting a grip on better password hashes

New rainbow table distributed computing project aims to create large, free resource for more complete and complex password security

By Roger Grimes

Jan 5, 2007 5 mins

Arrested Customer Communications

It's getting harder and harder for businesses to communicate with their customers via e-mail. If the spammers themselves don't stop them, the measures users take to keep the spam under control very likely will. And, as one reader recently o

By Ed Foster

Jan 5, 2007 5 mins

Take a Safari

Last fall I acquired a subscription to Safari Books Online. At first I wasn't sure what to think. I was a little skeptical thinking, well, this is just another online book repository where you can find all the out-dated IT books. That's not

By Sean McCown

Jan 5, 2007 2 mins

Databases

VMware Helps Software Development and Testing

For the longest time, VMware has been marketing and selling virtualization to solve one of the biggest problems in the data center today, server consolidation. Now, it looks like they are shifting some of that focus to the software development and te

Outsourcer claims skill shortage will raise wages. Will it also help raise H-1B quota?

Is there a shortage of tech workers or isn't there? In the answer to that lies the basis for increasing H-1B visa and L-1 visa quotas. According to Yoh, an outsourcer of tech talent and a division of Zimmermann and Day, a managed services compan

Jan 4, 2007 3 mins

Groovy language advances

The Groovy developer team this week is touting the final release of Groovy 1.0, a dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that integrates with the Java platform. Groovy features a Java-like syntax with features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or

By Paul Krill

Review: Coversant SoapBox sparks secure IM for the enteprise

Instant messaging (IM) is a business staple — whether it's used for communicating among colleagues or chatting with suppliers, partners, and clients. However, with personal IM networks, such as MSN, AIM, and Yahoo, you risk confidential informa

By Mike Heck

Jan 4, 2007 4 mins

Common Service Descriptions could be a key to Governance

When reviewing both WSDL and UDDI, the information you're able to obtain about services are very low level indeed, allowing you to both discover and bind to a service…let's face it, that is what they were designed to do. However, neither

By Dave Linthicum

Test Center Tracker: Piecing together Microsoft’s collaboration puzzle

In the collaboration Groove: Oliver's back from the holidays with a resolution to do a full review of Microsoft's Groove Server 2007 in the coming year. The reason? The flood of collaboration talk coming out of Redmond these days, from Shar

By Stephanie McLoughlin

A storage benchmark in the making

Five years from its inception, the Storage Performance Council sets out to reach a wider audience

By Mario Apicella

Jan 4, 2007 4 mins

Apple’s credibility lacking, aide sacked for hacking

Will Gates run for President, despite a shaky platform?

By Robert X. Cringely®

Jan 4, 2007 2 mins

Ruby readied for Visual Studio

Ruby in Steel Developer Edition, a Ruby programming environment for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, is being set for a late-January release, developer SapphireSteel Software said this week. The package features editing and debugging tools for Ruby and

By Paul Krill

Jan 3, 2007 1 min

Time to Get Yours

The topic of pay scale has smacked me in the face once again. I realize that some careers just natuarally pay more than others, but sometimes it's just ridiculous. I recently read another article where a big company executive was given a $35mill

By Sean McCown

Jan 3, 2007 4 mins

Databases

AJAX 101

In all the discussion of the difficulty of AJAX, the relative merits of the various free and commercial AJAX libraries, the AJAX support in control packages, and the AJAX support built into or added onto Web server technolo

By Martin Heller

Jan 3, 2007 2 mins

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Microsoft Collaboration 101

From SharePoint to Groove, it's tricky to keep Redmond's collaboration platforms straight

By Oliver Rist

Jan 3, 2007 4 mins

CIOs should resolve to change

For the bold at heart: Seek out innovators and fund their schemes with up to 3 percent of your budget

By David Margulius

Jan 3, 2007 3 mins

Software Development Technology Industry

Crimeware Evolves with polymorphing botnet worms

If you are a cracker who has written an exploit, you have a choice between fame and fortune. In the good old days, crackers chose fame. But now fortune appears to be far more appealing. Crimeware is a multibillion economy, according to Chad Harringto

Jan 2, 2007 3 mins

Test Center Tracker: Technology of the Year Awards

Pass the champagne: Now that the midnight hoopla is over, the party hats put away, the bar closed, and confetti cleaned out of couch cushions, clothing, and shrubbery, it's time to kick off 2007 with the InfoWorld Test Center's annual Techn

By Stephanie McLoughlin

Jan 2, 2007 1 min

OpenSource Blues

Hey guys. It's been kind of a long holiday for me but I'm back and mostly no worse for the wear. You may remember before when I was talking about auditing and my talk with a vendor, and that I promised to talk about OpenSource DBs in this a

By Sean McCown

Jan 2, 2007 2 mins

Databases

The Worst Vendor of 2006

Which company was the worst to deal with last year? That's a good question, and one that we should put to a vote. And just to make sure your voice gets heard, I'm going to let you vote more than once. Not only that, you can easily persuade

By Ed Foster

Jan 2, 2007 4 mins

Keeping up with crimeware

Polymorphing botnet worms are among the exploits crackers will bank on in 2007

Access Control Data and Information Security Malware

Jan 2, 2007 3 mins

Clueless manager duped by product demo

Your assignment: Build an Internet portal nobody needs with software that doesn't work

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Jan 2, 2007 3 mins

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

InfoWorld’s 2007 Technology of the Year Awards

InfoWorld has announced their annual Technology of the Year Award winners for 2007, and you guessed it, we have a few virtualization products that made the list! InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers have selected 41 hardware and software produ

Jan 1, 2007 2 mins

How is IT strategic?

Dear Bob …I am working for an IT department in a medium-sized company and have a very basic query. I would appreciate any pointers, earlier columns or any book to help clear my confusion.The question: If IT only exists to support Business Functions

By Bob Lewis

Jan 1, 2007 2 mins