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Microsoft Office 2007 a retail hit, NPD says Microsoft may be having trouble selling Windows Vista in retail, but its Office line is going like gangbusters, according to market research firm NPD Group. Part of the reason: People who switch from PCs to Macs. Best of open source applications A hunger for lighter-weight and lower-cost sales and CRM applications has brought great success to SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com, and also lifted the fortunes of open source offerings in the space. Open source ERP has had a harder time breaking out, but here too there are several impressive offerings to choose from. And if you're looking to open source for an enterprise portal, CMS, or Microsoft Exchange substitute, you will not be disappointed.  September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT SaaSy eXpresso gives a jolt to Excel workgroups You'd be hard-pressed to find any organization that doesn't depend on Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean spreadsheets are treated as an enterprise resource, and here's where the SaaS (software as a service) movement fills the gap. A new hosted application, called eXpresso, not only brings document management to spreadsheet-based workgroups, but jumps past basic file versioning solutions by adding considerable community features including chat and simultaneous editing – all without an IT admin lifting a finger. September 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT The great Office Server smorgasbord Part 3: forms and flexibility with Forms Server 2007 The great Office Server smorgasbord is back and ready to tackle forms processing, possibly the most powerful use case for SharePoint and Office we’ve seen until now. To get through this one, we’ll need to start with a discussion of InfoPath 2007, then look at the basic Forms Services included with Office SharePoint Server and finally check out what else you get once you spring for the full-on form power of Forms Server 2007. August 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT The great Office Server smorgasbord Part 2: MOSSing up Groove Server Tom works for Fergenschmeir Inc. Fergenschmeir just decided to merge with Widgeteria Corp., where Susan works. The two employees are leading the merger effort, and during an initial call quickly realize they need to be able to share loads of data quickly. So Susan initiates a Groove workspace and invites Tom via e-mail. In just a few minutes, they've got their own library of work documents, messaging, and other collaborative goodies without ever having to call the IT department. That's a powerful capability and it's why our second installment of the great Office Server smorgasbord covers Office Groove 2007. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Google Pack bundles Sun StarOffice Google Pack, Google's software download package, has added Sun's office suite, StarOffice 8, to its offerings. StarOffice, which Sun normally sells for $70, is free through Google Pack. August 13, 1:03 p.m. PDT Adobe axes link to Kinkos in Acrobat, Reader Adobe Systems will remove a menu option in its Acrobat and Reader programs that lets users send documents over the Internet to FedEx Kinkos for printing, the company said on Thursday. August 2, 4:52 a.m. PDT Microsoft: INCITS standards committee will approve Open XML A key U.S. standards committee remains undecided about whether it will support a document standard proposed by Microsoft, even while the company asserted that the committee has already signalled its "yes" in an upcoming vote. July 25, 9:20 a.m. PDT HP's Trusted Hardcopy secures paper documents Hewlett-Packard has developed technology at its lab in Bangalore, India, that secures paper documents against fraud and integrates paper documents with electronic processes by allowing paper to be used as a medium for data transfer. July 13, 5:15 a.m. PDT Google Desktop finally out for Linux Google launched a Linux version of Google Desktop on Wednesday, almost three years after the product's launch for the Windows operating system. June 28, 4:57 a.m. PDT Google partners with Ingram Ingram Micro will distribute Google's Search Appliance and Google Mini enterprise search devices, a deal intended to accelerate sales of the products, the companies announced Wednesday. June 27, 11:11 a.m. PDT Ingres steers Icebreaker to BI, ECM Ingres will take different approaches to supporting soft appliances that combine its database with applications from JasperSoft and Alfresco Software. June 14, 10:55 a.m. PDT SharePoint library: No non-geeks allowed Microsoft is pushing a bunch of new technologies as part of the Vista-Office-2007-Server-2008 product bonanza: The new Exchange, Viridian virtualization (eventually), Forefront security. The list is long and maybe even a little distinguished, but nothing is being pushed harder than SharePoint. June 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Adobe, FedEx Kinko's pair up to ease document printing A Web services partnership will allow U.S. users of Adobe Systems software to send documents via the Internet to FedEx Kinko's centers for printing. June 6, 7:45 a.m. PDT Exclusive: Astoria On-Demand tames complex docs Most enterprises drive their Web sites and intranets using a CMS (content management system). That’s because CMSes offer consistent branding, easy editing, content reuse, and approval workflows. Unfortunately, publishing systems for producing structured technical manuals came late to the party in delivering these benefits. Sometimes you must learn older SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) -- or deal with expensive and cumbersome XML editors. Astoria On-Demand sidesteps these problems with a highly usable and quickly deployed hosted system based on OASIS’ DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. May 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT Mac Office, Office 2007 now get along Microsoft unveiled a stopgap file converter on Wednesday that allows Mac Office users to work with Office 2007 Word document files. May 16, 11:07 a.m. PDT Enterprises seek social-network effect Social bookmarking and IRC (Internet relay chat) top the list of must-have tools for organizations that want to leverage Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise, according to a Web 2.0 Expo panel moderated by Rob Rueckert of Intel Capital. April 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT What the enterprise can learn from consumer technologies Today’s corporate end-users are far more tech-savvy than their productivity with IT tools indicates. After all, screen-deep in IMs, widgets, and elaborate consumer Web apps, they’re proving themselves well-versed in the production and distribution of content as facilitated by the consumer Web 2.0 craze. April 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT Xerox to buy Global Imaging Systems Xerox Corp. will pay US$1.5 billion to acquire Global Imaging Systems Inc., an office imaging equipment reseller that focuses on small and mid-sized businesses, the companies announced Monday. April 2, 9:48 a.m. PDT Bill Clinton backs electronic health records Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Thursday advocated an electronic medical records (EMR) law and said blogs could aid the U.S. political process. March 29, 8:52 a.m. PST Microsoft, Fuji Xerox agree to cross-license patents In a move aimed at speeding up development of new document management systems, Microsoft and Japan's Fuji Xerox Co. have agreed to a patent deal to use each other's technology. March 22, 6:19 a.m. PST Pitney Bowes to buy MapInfo Document and mail management vendor Pitney Bowes said Thursday it plans to acquire MapInfo, a provider of location intelligence software and services, for about $408 million in cash. March 15, 11:36 a.m. PST The benefits of a fast close A fast close — the ability of a company to complete its accounting cycle and close its books — is more than just a badge of honor for the finance department. It means dollars. The question is, Is your technology getting in the way or is it helping? February 27, 3:00 a.m. PST InfoSpace, Fast deepen mobile collaboration Fast Search & Transfer and InfoSpace have expanded the scope of a years-long collaboration in mobile search, aiming to improve the technology they offer to carriers and end users. February 12, 3:41 p.m. PST Microsoft cures its connectile dysfunction I don't ask much. If the Pats can't be in the Super Bowl, then the team to beat them out for the big spot needs to lose. I mean, that's practically etched in silicon by Stephen Hawking, right? Was it too much to ask? Apparently. For a while there, I wanted to run QB Rex Grossman through a shredder, but I suppose it's unfair to crucify someone who's struggling so hard with puberty. Instead I'm trying to concentrate on the positives of Super Bowl XLI: Grossman's MVP award from the Colts would have been one. The other was Sprint's "connectile dysfunction" ad. That was inspired. February 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Today’s end-user: Hardly working The U.S. workplace is the new dysfunctional family. I’ve reached that conclusion after stumbling on a string of statistics that make me wonder how American companies ever get anything done, much less show a profit. February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Upgrade disasters made easy I’m the technical administrator at a large medical group in Canada. Among other things, I’m responsible for the LAN, the WAN, all the desktops, laptops, peripherals, and a medical-records application that’s at the core of our group’s operations. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been struggling to make that app perform more reliably. At the same time, our infrastructure has been growing fast, and sluggish performance from our overloaded servers had become a problem. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST OurStory.com lets you write a life story At first glance, OurStory.com looks like just another social networking/blogging/photo sharing hodgepodge, but spend a few minutes on the site and you'll see why it's not. This is MySpace for the rest of us. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Will EMC's information gamble work? In June 2006, EMC announced that it would acquire RSA Security for $2.1 billion, only to be met with a healthy dose of analyst skepticism and a 3 percent drop in its stock price. Many on Wall Street considered the price tag too high in light of RSA’s 2005 revenues of $310 million. Moreover, industry observers were disquieted by EMC’s unrelenting buying spree: RSA was merely the most expensive purchase out of a whopping 23 acquisitions it had made since early 2003, which have crossed the spectrum from systems management to content management to BPO. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST EMC demystified Reporters just love EMC. After all, there’s always something new to write about, given that the company has spent the past three years on a punch-drunk buying spree, acquiring shiny new companies at a rate of roughly one every other month. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST BEA plans to show off Runner and Graffiti New software from BEA Systems for tagging, presenting and searching enterprise data will be shown in Paris in March, company officials said Tuesday. January 16, 8:45 a.m. PST Capitalize on emerging collaboration options Messaging vendors have long been packing their wares with features in hopes of providing an all-encompassing platform that fulfills every enterprise’s collaboration needs. Rather than shell out far too much again this year for seldom or inefficiently used capabilities, why not consider emerging alternatives as a way to assemble a collaboration environment suited to your particular budget and needs? January 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft ends 2006 with a bang Many companies had significant impacts on the IT technology landscape in 2006, but Microsoft stands alone in one special category: Prolific Tech Spewage. Vista, Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server 2007 are the four releases on everyone’s lips today, but if you cast your eye back across the narrows of 2006, you’ll see that the Redmond elves were busy with launch events all year long, not just in November. Let’s do a short recap: Exchange Hosted Services, Forefront Client Security, SharePoint Designer 2007, two System Center client/server releases, Small Business Server 2003 Release 2, Windows Live and (more importantly) Office Live, updates to Virtual Server, and VoIP capability for Desktop Communicator, just for starters. Developers got loads of goodies in 2006 as well (updates to Visual Studio, ASP.NET AJAX, the Robotics Studio, and more), and even the after-hours crowd got new toys as Microsoft handily spanked the Wii and the PlayStation -- at least this year. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST IBM, Yahoo launch free enterprise search tool IBM and Yahoo have developed a free, entry-level, enterprise search application that at least one analyst believes will seriously disrupt the low-end segment of this market where Google has been selling many of its Mini search devices. December 13, 4:13 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST We need a universal canvas that doesn't suck Like many of you, probably, I tire-kicked Google Spreadsheets when it first arrived on the scene, then forgot all about it. A nice bit of AJAX hackery, I thought, but no serious competition for Excel. I was wrong, though, and here’s an anecdote that explains why. November 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Springhill Medical Center emerges from the paper age For software developers, a crucial metric of success is the ability of their organization’s employees to get solid results from the applications the developers build, a practice known in the industry as “eating one’s own dog food.” Mark Kilborn, a regional CIO of Eclipsys, has spent the past three years helping Springhill Medical Center in Mobile, Ala., in its effort to automate emergency department procedures. He got to witness the results of his team’s project when, in early October, his 14-year-old son broke his wrist playing football. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Adobe releases Acrobat 8, updates Creative Suite Adobe Systems on Monday released Acrobat 8, a new version of its popular document authoring and reading software, and integrated it with its upgraded Creative Suite 2.3 Premium. September 18, 4:19 a.m. PDT Xerox refreshes product line, expands services Xerox wooed Wall Street and users last week in New York with a three-day rollout of new printers, software and strategic initiatives that underscored how services will be the engine of growth for the company. September 11, 4:19 a.m. PDT Open Text to buy Hummingbird Open Text Corp. has agreed to buy Hummingbird Ltd. for US$489 million in cash, prompting Hummingbird to reject the $465 million offer from Symphony Technology Group LLC that it accepted in May. August 8, 9:24 a.m. PDT Appian puts polish into BPM I look at four key elements when gauging the potential ROI and success of a BPM package: adaptability to existing platforms and applications, process insight and activity monitoring, usability, and the strength of the rules engine. On all counts, Appian Enterprise 5.1 fills the bill with its full-featured, people-centric, process-management suite. July 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Truce arises in ODF battle Microsoft's decision to allow its Office software to handle the increasingly popular OpenDocument Format (ODF) was a belated acknowledgement that the company could lose customers if it didn't, analysts said Thursday. July 6, 10:19 a.m. PDT Send us your hacks Do you have a hack you’re particularly proud of? (And by hack I mean an ingenious fix-it job that may not follow established procedures but gets the task done.) I ask because this week’s cover story, “Heroic Hacks and Inspired Work-arounds” (page 26), relates six seat-of-the-pants hacks that saved the day when a company was in a pickle. These enterprising enterprise rescues, from the case files of three InfoWorld contributing editors, are all variations on a theme — how to solve a problem using smarts, a certain twisted logic, and the tools at hand. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: E-mail archiving the home-brew way Compliance is a painful reality for many IT administrators. Among the growing list of tasks, e-mail archiving is becoming a major requirement. Not only are various government audits interested in e-mail archiving data, but legal actions have begun to call on this information with increasing frequency. The demand for e-mail archive retrieval has become so great, in fact, that corporate e-mail hosting services -- Microsoft’s new Exchange Hosted Services, for example -- have begun adding high-availability archiving to their service menus. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Web-based alternatives to PowerPoint When Edward Tufte famously declared that PowerPoint is evil, I violently agreed. “If your words or images are not on point,” he wrote, “making them dance in color won’t make them relevant.” May 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Gates outlines SharePoint strategy, hammers IBM Microsoft's Bill Gates Monday opened the first ever SharePoint Conference by anointing SharePoint Server 2007 the key to the company's collaboration future and ripping rival IBM/Lotus. May 16, 9:17 a.m. PDT SAP to use HP print management technology To enhance print capabilities across its applications, SAP will use central print management technology from Hewlett-Packard, the German business software vendor announced Monday. May 16, 6:06 a.m. PDT The evolution of office document standards In high tech it has always been the same. What to an outsider may seem like an inconsequential piece of new technology, to an insider is visionary. This is the case with the recent ISO preliminary vote approving the OpenDocument format as a specification, not to mention the excitement surrounding the fact that the OpenDocument Foundation has completed a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows Office applications to create ODF documents natively. May 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Zimbra's Web-based platform takes aim at conventional e-mail Managing a high-volume e-mail system using traditional tools can be a demanding and costly task. That’s why Zimbra wants to rewrite the book on enterprise messaging. “It’s a clean-slate view of the world,” says CEO Satish Dharmaraj. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM talks up master data management in WebSphere IBM came out with a new version of its WebSphere Product Center middleware Wednesday, emphasizing its enhanced master data management capabilities. May 3, 2:37 p.m. PDT Accessing the web of databases I've just posted the fourth installment in my new series of Friday podcasts. It’s an interview with Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software. OpenLink’s flagship product is a universal database and application server, Virtuoso, which I last wrote about in 2003. May 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Are your software services compliant? In case you haven’t noticed, just about every part of the IT infrastructure must comply with some regulation or other. April 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Set my data free Last weekend I helped a friend categorize her Schedule C expenses. All of her business income is in QuickBooks, but the expenses aren’t. I would have to reconstruct those from bank and credit card records. Although this friend has online accounts at both institutions, my Spidey sense was tingling: I knew there was going to be trouble. April 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT HP demos technology for developing markets Hewlett-Packard researchers based in India demonstrated on Monday several new technologies aimed at the unique computing demands of developing markets such as India, from typing complex languages to authenticating paper documents. April 11, 4:28 a.m. PDT Reinventing the intranet In an interview long ago, Marc Andreessen told me about the moment he knew Netscape’s business plan would succeed. That plan, as you may recall, was modeled on Gillette’s: give away razors (browsers and mail/news clients) and sell blades (enterprise servers). For Andreessen, the magical moment came when, shortly after the word “intranet” was coined, he heard it echoing all around him in a restaurant. April 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Christian Science Monitor seeks closer technology relationships The Christian Science Monitor for the past nine years has been saddled with an inflexible content management system that makes it difficult to modify the newspaper’s Web site or deliver content to new devices, such as smartphones. That tool is emblematic of what Curt Edge sees as a larger issue at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which publishes the Monitor in newspaper and online editions. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Metered Web services Amazon’s new simple storage service, S3, burst on the scene a few hours before I had to hop on a plane. There was enough time to sign up for an account, download and run some sample programs, snag the documentation, and take the pulse of the blogosphere. But now, Wi-Fi-less at 35,000 feet, I can’t connect my laptop to the S3 data cloud in order to try out some of the ideas it has sparked. Frustrating! March 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Can Google gain a foothold in the enterprise? Google's got its eyes on your corporate data, and if its ability to parlay its whip-smart Web search technology into a vast empire of consumer services is any indication, you may be Googling enterprise apps and data sooner than you think. February 17, 4:15 p.m. PST Google partners with BearingPoint Google is teaming up with consultancy and systems integrator BearingPoint to peddle Google enterprise search products bundled with BearingPoint services, the vendors plan to announce on Tuesday. February 14, 8:32 a.m. PST Opening up iTunes U Criticizing free services is always dicey. So when I dinged Stanford University and Apple for the nonaccessibility of the lectures at itunes.stanford.edu, I knew I risked seeming churlish. But there are some things about this deal that rub me the wrong way. February 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Product Previews WebEx Opens Tap to Systems Management After handing it a wrench with the WebEx Support Center, software-as-a-service specialist WebEx is now offering an entire toolbox. Developed in partnership with Everdream, WebEx System Management Services will allow IT organizations to manage Windows desktop systems through a hosted Web application that integrates asset management, software distribution, patch management, virus protection, and automated online backup capabilities. System Management Services will be available Feb. 1 and cost from $5 to $15 per computer per month, depending on services. WebEx System Management Services, WebEx January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Update: Microsoft has record Q2, misses revenue estimates Microsoft Corp. on Thursday reported the highest quarterly revenue in company history for its fiscal 2006 second quarter on the strength of its Windows OS and a series of highly anticipated product releases. Still, the company fell slightly shy of analysts' revenue expectations. January 26, 5:00 p.m. PST New Adobe software turns 3-D images to PDFs Adobe Systems Monday is releasing software that will allow designers and engineers to save 3-D images as PDF (portal document format) files and share those files with anyone who has the free Adobe Acrobat reader, the company said. January 23, 4:29 a.m. PST Family-friendly enterprise calendaring When Ray Ozzie posted an announcement to his Weblog about Microsoft’s proposed SSE (Simple Share Extensions) for RSS and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), I was delighted. On the technical front, it’s great to see the synchronization DNA of Groove and Lotus Notes finding its way, at last, onto the Web. But on the social front, it was a milestone, too. January 18, 3:00 a.m. PST What isn't storage virtualization? Vendors often use the term "virtualization" to describe myriad products, including global name spaces, virtual storage area networks (VSANs), pooled NAS (network-attached storage), thin-provisioning software, virtual file systems, virtual tape libraries, RAID arrays and disk clusters, and virtualized application and file servers (such as EMC's VMWare). But although these technologies all use some sort of virtualization, they don't actually qualify as storage virtualization. January 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Adobe document management software to support Office Adobe Systems has acquired the DRM (digital rights management) technology division from CAD software maker Navisware in a move to extend the formats supported by Adobe's document management software, the company said Monday. January 9, 4:28 a.m. PST Massachusetts appoints acting CIO Massachusetts has appointed an acting chief information officer (CIO), Bethann Pepoli, a state spokesman confirmed Friday. The previous CIO Peter Quinn announced his resignation late last month, after drawing plenty of attention, both positive and negative, as he spearheaded a controversial proposal for the Commonwealth to move away from Microsoft's electronic document formats in favor of the OpenDocument file format. January 6, 12:27 p.m. PST EMC Documentum 5 brings mastery to content management See correction below January 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Wikipedia, competition, and the future By the time you read this column, Wikipedia will be celebrating its fifth anniversary. It’s been a wilder ride than anybody could have imagined, and it’s gotten even more so lately. In a widely cited incident, John Seigenthaler, Sr., a prominent journalist, publisher, and political figure, reacted with justifiable horror when he learned that his bio entry in Wikipedia falsely implicated him in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. January 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Document management systems go to court Two proposed amendments to the federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if passed by Congress, will have a major impact on corporations and their IT departments. One expert I spoke with called the situation a legal Chernobyl. December 27, 3:00 a.m. PST The two-way media Web For a blog entry this week, I wanted to quote an interesting remark by Iona CTO Eric Newcomer on how traditional distributed computing differs from XML-based Web services. If he’d made that remark on his blog, I’d simply have quoted the text. Instead, however, he made it on a Webcast published by SYS-CON.TV. Creating the video equivalent of a pull quote is much harder than just selecting, copying, and pasting text, but it’s doable. As I worked out the solution, I reflected on the unholy alliance that Silicon Valley is forming with Hollywood. December 14, 3:00 a.m. PST Layoffs pending after Adobe, Macromedia merger Adobe Systems will reduce part of its workforce in light of its acquisition of Macromedia, saying Monday that employees who don't lose their jobs may be offered relocation packages. December 5, 6:48 a.m. PST The two-way data web Two years ago, I gave the keynote address on the opening day of XML 2003. The next day, Adam Bosworth delivered a weirdly complementary keynote, in which he began to lay out an idea he’s been developing ever since, first at BEA and now at Google. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the truly scalable databases of the future will be more like the Web than like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server. November 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Beyond office document formats Let’s cut to the chase in the Massachusetts/Microsoft brouhaha over office document formats. One possible outcome: Microsoft Office gains support for the OASIS OpenDocument format, either from Microsoft or from the open source community. Another outcome: Microsoft tweaks its Office XML licensing to conform to the definition of openness that governments are rightly insisting on. November 9, 3:00 a.m. PST Managing metadata When we talk and write about IT issues, we use certain words to mean many different things: "Platform," "architecture," and "integration" are among the worst offenders. But the most overloaded term in the IT lexicon may well be "metadata." October 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT WebEx attacks SMB collaboration market One month after closing its acquisition of Intranets.com, WebEx Communications is launching an updated, rebranded version of Intranets.com's hosted collaboration software suite, a move aimed at expanding WebEx's share of the SMB (small and medium business) market before Microsoft conquers the space. October 11, 7:11 a.m. PDT Is a Web-based office suite on the way? The Google/Sun press conference on Oct. 3, which announced a deal to jointly “promote and distribute software technologies,” is generating a great deal of speculation. October 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Former Novell exec's firm supports Suse Linux, rebrands StreamServe, helmed by the former second-in-command at Novell, Wednesday announced its software now supports Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9. The move is part of StreamServe's revamping of its image put in place since the Novell executive joined the company in April and a way to garner more business, particularly in Europe. September 21, 7:19 a.m. PDT Reinventing the office suite The controversy over office document formats heated up again this month when Microsoft and Massachusetts tangled over the state’s firm intention to standardize on the OpenOffice.org XML format. Personally, I think everyone’s barking up the wrong tree. Office suites haven’t felt like the center of the computing universe for a very long time. The network’s where the action is. September 14, 4:00 a.m. PDT A buyer's guide to open source Build or buy? It's a question that vexes every enterprise IT manager. On the one hand, developing applications from scratch can be a difficult endeavor, one fraught with the possibility of failure. On the other hand, high price tags and the aggravation of installation, maintenance, and support contracts can make purchasing a commercial package equally painful. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source content management With the Web becoming the backbone for most enterprise communications, you'll find there's no shortage of Web CMSes (content management systems) available, including a wide range of open source options. Naturally, there's far more at stake than licensing costs when betting your intranet or public Web site on these products, so it's important to look for not just functionality but also frequent updates, a healthy user community, and the availability of professional support. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Xythos doctors doc management Some technologies sit by the wayside because they take too much training and effort to use. EDM (enterprise document management) -- which often intimidates users with complex workflows and intricate interfaces -- is a perfect example. Xythos Enterprise Document Management Suite 5.0, however, bucks this trend, providing essential document management functions that work in familiar ways. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Tag mania sweeps the Web When I first wrote about social tagging services last year, Flickr (for shared photos) and del.icio.us (for shared bookmarks) were among a handful of tag-enriched applications. Nowadays you can't turn around without tripping over a new one. Three newcomers are My Web 2.0, Rojo 2.0, and Swik. July 20, 5:00 a.m. PDT Adobe posts solid Q2, prepares for Macromedia takeover As it prepares to take over Macromedia, Adobe Systems reassured Wall Street by turning in solid second-quarter financial results, with revenue and income hitting expectations and sales reportedly on target around the world. June 17, 11:12 a.m. PDT Adobe releases patches for Acrobat and Reader Adobe Systems on Wednesday rolled out patches for security vulnerabilities found in Adobe Reader 7.0 and 7.0.1, and in Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and 7.0.1. June 15, 1:50 p.m. PDT Taking charge of the enterprise information lifecycle There’s a stage in the life of a new technology in which half the world thinks it’s a whole new paradigm and the other half thinks it’s all hype. Half says it will never happen whereas the other half says, “We’re doing it now.” And even the most improbable vendor claims to have strategies and products to support it. So it is with ILM (information life cycle management). June 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT PDF tools seek to undercut Acrobat Zeroing in on the specific needs of business users, Arts PDF and ScanSoft are introducing PDF creation and editing tools designed to offer more functionality at a lower price point than Adobe’s Acrobat products. May 9, 5:00 a.m. PDT Bloggers and the law In a recent column, I called on companies to follow the lead of Sun Microsystems and liberalize their corporate blogging policies. This week I spoke with no fewer than two law firms and three attorneys to get the skinny on where your life as an employee stops and your life as a private citizen starts, according to the law. May 3, 5:00 a.m. PDT Healthcare IT spending should boost ROI, lower DOA SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Advocates of increased IT spending in the healthcare industry point to the benefits of electronic record keeping, but improving treatment and reducing errors are ultimately more important uses of technology, panelists said during a healthcare event sponsored by IBM Monday. April 26, 5:13 a.m. PDT AtlasIPM maps data for compliance PSS Systems this week rolled out AtlasIPM (Information Policy Management), a suite of products for creating and enforcing information policies across the enterprise. April 19, 4:10 p.m. PDT A field guide to software as a service Everywhere you turn, another company pops up offering SaaS (software as a service). Inspired by the success of Salesforce.com, SaaS vendors are hoping customers large and small will get the message: Browser-based, pay-as-you-go applications mean fewer servers for your IT department to maintain and less capital to shake loose from the CFO for software licenses and hardware. April 18, 5:00 a.m. PDT Google video to accept submissions SAN FRANCISCO - Google's video search engine may soon take you to your neighbors' home movies. April 4, 2:43 p.m. PDT Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis This article has been modified from its original version. Certain quoted material has been removed because its veracity could not be confirmed. March 28, 6:00 a.m. PST Microsoft considering WinFS support in Windows XP Windows XP may be updated to support a new file system technology that Microsoft is working on for the next version of Windows. March 15, 6:27 a.m. PST NextPage solves document-management dilemma Software developers have used version-control apps for decades to manage changes to documents and track who’s got the latest copy. Business users have had access to document-control systems, too, but these systems haven’t caught on. That may be because the typical document-management system is a centralized application run by the IT department, and using it involves changing how you work. March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST NetSuite targets services companies with new vertical app Walking the vertical applications path, NetSuite on Thursday added a new service to its fleet: NetCRM-Services Edition. March 3, 6:00 a.m. PST Start-ups offer blog and e-mail monitoring I’m just back from the annual Demo conference, this year held in Scottsdale, Ariz. If you’re not familiar with this 15-year-old event, the audience is usually a mixture of venture capitalists, the investment arms of high-tech companies, and the media. Every six minutes, representatives from a different company — mostly startups — appear on stage offering a new product or product idea that they hope will capture the notice of those in attendance. More than any one particular product, though, I typically find that the kind of products shown is a leading indicator of what business buyers are looking for. February 25, 3:00 p.m. PST Update: HP board dismisses Fiorina Hewlett-Packard announced Wednesday that its board of directors has dismissed Carly Fiorina as the company's chairman and chief executive officer. February 9, 11:22 a.m. PST ShareMethods helps sales teams seal the deal Sales teams are constantly challenged to be more productive and increase revenues. SFA applications help users track leads, but they typically lack an important function needed in the sales cycle: managing the documents required, say, to produce presentations and proposals. January 28, 3:00 p.m. PST Where was desktop search when we needed it? Desktop search engines are sprouting like weeds. Google's showed up in October, then Microsoft's in December, and now Yahoo's this month. It's a story full of bizarre twists and turns. Did you know, for example, that Microsoft gave us a capable desktop search engine years ago? January 21, 3:00 p.m. PST > Applications |
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