Vista re-revisited: Enterprise Windows columnist Oliver Rist has been tracking Vista since before it was even called Vista. Now that he's had plenty of time to play around with Release Candidate 2, he's delivering some in-depth insights about Redmond's forthcoming OS spawn, not to mention a mighty snazzy slideshow of Vista visuals. Thus far, it appears stable, but there are still some Active X and third-party-app interoperability issues that need to be resolved. No doubt developers at Microsoft will be working longer hours than Santa's elves to get Vista shipped on time,
Testing, testing, 1-2-3: Our Test Center contributors are continuing to crank out some really nice product previews and reviews here in the Test Center Daily. Take, for example, this preview of Tableau 2.1 by Jeff Angus. Jeff finds a nicely upgraded business intelligence solution, loaded with additional functions, better scalability potential, tighter work with back-end databases and a boatload of new analytical functions.
Decoding encryption: As customer and employee data slowly leaks out of company databases around the world, the word encryption has grown in popularity. But organizations should encrypt with care, cautions Sean McCown, scribe of the Database Underground: It can be quite invasive, limiting users' access to data and potentially gumming up business processes. "The point is that encryption can be necessary, but really only under limited circumstances where all other tactics have failed. Basically, you should look at encrypting your data as surgery. Don't do it unless all of the other avenues have been exhausted, and there's just no other way to get the gerbil out." (Thanks for the visual, Sean.)
Posted by Ted Samson on October 19, 2006 06:00 AM
