Reviews

Office suites in the cloud: Microsoft Office Web Apps versus Google Docs and Zoho

Microsoft's fledgling Web-based productivity apps have one key advantage over SaaS rivals: amazing fidelity to the desktop-bound Word, Excel, and PowerPoint document formats

Test Center: SANs tuned for virtualization pack nice surprises

Compellent, Dell, HP, Pillar Data, and roll-your-own Pillar/DataCore bring strong storage management features to XenServer, VMware, and Hyper-V environments

Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 is hot on VMware’s heels

The much-improved Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 combo smooths the bumps to Windows server virtualization

17-in. laptops with big screens, low prices

Notebook too cramped? Try one of these (surprisingly affordable) big boys from Acer, Dell and Toshiba.

Dell’s Latitude Z laptop goes for the high end

Centralized PC power managers not created equal

Autonomic, BigFix, and Symantec Altiris solutions offer a wealth of potential power savings, but also differences in policy depth, granularity, and ease

Citrix XenApp 5 extends the reach

The leader in application virtualization shows us why with the addition of VM-hosted applications, plus usability and manageability enhancements, in XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2

First glimpse: Microsoft Office Web Apps

Microsoft's Technical Preview of Web-based editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint shows that Google is in for a fight

AMD, Intel budget chipsets go head to head

Budget-beating out-of-band management

Opengear's all-in-one appliance combines service processor aggregation, serial console, and environmental monitoring at a nice price

Block data leaks at the endpoint

TrendMicro, Websense offer effective protection against insider security breaches

Kings of open source monitoring

Built on open source, OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring

OS deathmatch: Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7

I've put both operating systems through their paces, selected categories for a head-to-head competition, and then chosen a winner in each category

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Perfection, refined

Numerous usability enhancements and important reengineering under the hood make Snow Leopard a worthy update to the king of operating systems

Enterprise social software spurs connections

The InfoWorld Test Center reveals the strengths and weaknesses of blogging, wiki, and community solutions from CubeTree, Jive, Socialtext, and Telligent

Last of the red hot Sun servers

Sun's fast and cheap Nehalem-powered Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 promise to put some sizzle into Oracle's hardware business

The greatest open source software of all time

InfoWorld's Open Source Hall of Fame recognizes the 36 most important free open source software projects in history (and today)

Palm’s Mojo SDK for the Pre mixes simplicity, rough edges

With Palm's WebOS and development tools, Web programming ascends to the throne and powers the app layer, but Palm's platform is clearly a work in progress

Cisco IPS 7.0 raises the bar

New global threat correlation feature boosts effectiveness of intrusion prevention devices

IBM BladeCenter delivers speed, power savings

A virtualization-ready combo of performance, energy efficiency and manageability

The best free open source software for Windows

If you run Microsoft Windows, you owe it to yourself to try these 10 killer open source apps — InfoWorld's top picks

iPhone development tools that work the way you do

You don't need to master Cocoa and Objective C to create killer iPhone apps. Rhomobile, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, and Ansca tools leverage standard Web technologies and still tap native features

Open source Hive: Large-scale, distributed data processing made easy

Thank heaven for Hive, a data analysis and query front end for Hadoop that makes Hadoop data files look like SQL tables

Windows 7 in review: The revenge of Windows Vista

Windows Vista lacked the right stuff to unseat Windows XP. Does Windows 7 really have what it takes?

Office 2010 looks solid and smooth

Microsoft's technical preview packs a streamlined look and feel, co-authoring and collaboration hooks, and numerous refinements, with the promise of Office Web apps to come

Nehalem workstations: A new era in performance

Intel's latest chips revolutionize the market. In InfoWorld tests, Dell led in price-performance, HP in overall design, Lenovo in single-processor systems. All have speed to burn

Hands on: Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro packs a punch

Faster processors, more battery life and a better display make for a great — and small — package

MacBook Pro soars to new heights

The best laptop money can buy is primped and primed for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and professionals of all stripes

Cloud control systems tame the ether

3tera, Enomaly, Kaavo, and RightScale take myriad and mixed approaches to managing virtual servers in the sky

The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org

SoftMaker Office 2008 shows superior compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, while OpenOffice.org 3.1 underwhelms

The many faces of OpenOffice

Variants from IBM, Novell, Sun, and elsewhere tout a variety of advantages over the OpenOffice.org core

Office-compatibility torture test

SoftMaker Office shines and OpenOffice.org falters in InfoWorld's Office-fidelity face-off

First look: Microsoft Office 2010

An early Community Technology Preview reveals the obligatory Windows 7 flash, a more smoothly integrated Outlook, easy macro-like automation, and the blissful end to nested-menu tedium

Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill?

Apart from the popularity of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Office happens to be the world's most successful rapid application development platform

Bending the back office: Open source CRM and ERP

SugarCRM, Openbravo, and Compiere tap the power of open source development to make customization easy, but the line between community and commercial is quickly crossed

First Look: Microsoft Security Essentials offers free and non-intrusive protection against malware

Microsoft's latest anti-malware application uses the same engine as OneCare, but is smaller, faster and more efficient than its predecessor

VisiWave Site Survey SO: Solid 3D features

Psiber RF3D WiFiPlanner: Covers the basics

Nuts About Nets AirHORN: Signal generator

Motorola SiteScanner: For analytical measurement

First look: iPhone 3G S is evolution in action

The iPhone 3G S is less revolutionary than its predecessors, but is still moving in the right direction

First look: iPhone OS 3.0 is better for business, but IT won’t be satisfied

My iPod Touch slowed to a crawl, making the many useful new iPhone update features hard to use — at first

Business netbooks: IT revolution or contradiction in terms?

Exclusive review: HP BladeSystem Matrix

HP's state-of-the-art blade server system and array of automation tools haven't squeezed all manual labor out of service provisioning, but they show the automated and adaptive datacenter is within reach

Review: Apple’s 15-in. MacBook Pro now faster — and cheaper

In recessionary times, who doesn't want more for less?

VMware upgrade reaches for the clouds

vSphere 4.0 is a massive update to VMware's flagship hypervisor and management toolset

First look: Adobe Flash and Flex ignite with Flash Catalyst

Adobe Flex 4 SDK, Flash Builder 4, and Flash Catalyst betas close the gap between great UI design and rich Internet application development

First look: Microsoft Silverlight 3 challenges Adobe AIR

Redmond's much-enhanced rich Internet application platform also runs on Windows or Mac desktops, online or offline

Your next iPhone: iPhone 3.0 update or iPhone 3G S?

Between Apple's free OS upgrade, the new next-generation handset, and the heavily discounted 3G, it's decision-time for both devotees and holdouts

Midrange telepresence systems marry high quality with affordability

The Polycom QDX 6000 and the LifeSize Express 200 deliver a high-quality face-to-face experience at a price any company will find appealing