|
|
Free Newsletters
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech You’ve heard of Christmas in July, that classic advertising gimmick designed to lure shoppers into stores despite the oppressive heat and humidity. We’ll, we’ve got New Year’s in August, which invites you to stay indoors and read “The next big things in IT” -- 15 predictions about the future of technology. SAP describes road ahead for its PLM software Business applications vendor SAP on Wednesday laid out the future path for its product lifecycle management (PLM) software over the next three-plus years. August 8, 4:24 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 EMC taps users to expedite e-discovery Seeking to improve enterprise governance of e-mail and file archiving systems, EMC today announced upgrades to its EmailXtender e-mail management and DiskXtender file archiving products. April 16, 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 Tech 101 for startups “It’s not the old guard in manufacturing anymore. Now there is a new guard” that understands technology and can digest the information and knowledge that advanced business applications offer to young, growing companies. March 6, 3:00 a.m. PST More IT war stories Off the Record, the real-world slice of life that graces the last page of InfoWorld, is one of our most popular columns. I know this from reader surveys and from all the e-mail I receive about it. As reader Roland Sickenberger put it recently, “It’s my favorite part of the magazine, kind of like a ‘Dilbert come to life’ thing.” March 5, 3:00 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 Primavera outsources agile product development to India Primavera Systems, a vendor of enterprise project management software, has outsourced product development using the agile development process to the Indian operation of product engineering outsourcer Symphony Services. February 23, 4:48 a.m. PST The real appeal of SaaS If we are ever to cut through the hype in hopes of determining how good SaaS (software as a service) really is, the best way would be to talk to companies that use SaaS. Of course, each application or service must stand on its own — SaaS can’t turn a pig’s ear into a silk purse, as they say — but I’ve been wondering what it is that’s inherent to all or most SaaS applications that makes the model so appealing to midsize and larger companies. February 13, 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 12 quick IT productivity wins Stop us if this story sounds familiar. You’ve been asked to a) keep your infrastructure humming and b) come up with innovative ways to use technology to boost the bottom line. Meanwhile, your resources are stretched tighter than a $2 string on a banjo and you spend so much time putting out fires you should be wearing a helmet and carrying a hose. February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Women in technology: A call to action A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology. January 29, 3:03 a.m. PST Back to school: Getting girls into IT Despite the success of various education initiatives in the past several years, there’s little doubt that the shortage of women in technology begins on the playground. As such, many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school -- way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age. January 29, 3:02 a.m. PST Activism provides competitive advantage for IT Encountering another woman working in technology was a rare event for me when I started out in IT many years ago. In the years since, women have made significant strides, sometimes against great odds, proving their mettle as both tech execs and engineers. January 29, 3:01 a.m. PST Gender crisis in IT You don’t need a degree in statistics to recognize that IT is a men’s club. Just walk the floor of any tech conference or, in all likelihood, your own office — XY chromosomes everywhere you look. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Upgrading to Vista? Proceed with caution Certainly no coincidence, Microsoft has decked out its much-anticipated OS upgrade with beautiful landscape wallpapers — vistas, to be exact. But, as calming as these background images may be for end-users getting acquainted with Vista, for IT directors, the landscape approaching an enterprise rollout of any new Windows operating system has always been rocky. Convincing management with compelling ROI, quelling grumpy user rebellions, and making sure the whole thing doesn’t blow up in your face are by now well-known impediments along any Windows migration path. It’s enough to make IT departments considering the journey downright cautious. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Technology of the Gods January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of beginnings and endings, who reportedly was able to look both forward and back. So for our Jan. 1 issue, we pay homage to the mythological immortal with our seventh annual Technology of the Year Awards, an analysis of where IT has been and where it’s going in 2007. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Why many software projects fail Several years ago, I was hired as IT manager at the convention center of a well-known Gulf Coast metropolis. There was plenty of action, with one big show after another. For the first few weeks, my job revolved around repairing recalcitrant PCs, riding herd on the Exchange server, and making sure the wireless network was operational so conventioneers could get their e-mail and exchange files. December 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Review of reviews It’s coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of the year. (It’s really only a semi-hiatus; InfoWorld.com will continue to perk over the holidays with a slightly reduced slate of stories.) December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST In Brief: Xora, Garmin team up on navigation for mobile workers Xora and Garmin International announced Tuesday that Garmin’s navigation technology is now available in Xora's GPS TimeTrack solution. November 7, 6:07 a.m. PST Redefining innovation Innovative ideas are a dime a dozen, according to Jim Andrew, senior partner at big-time consultancy BCG. In fact, at most companies, coming up with great concepts for a product, service, or process isn’t even an issue. But turning those ideas into money … ah, there’s the rub. October 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Moving up the IT stack IBM’s purchase of asset and service management powerhouse MRO Software — hot on the heels of HP’s Mercury acquisition — could signal a new chapter in the IT industry. After years of helping IT support a Rube Goldberg style infrastructure, the major vendors are hoping to give both IT and business honchos a broader view. August 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Fred Dillman A 25-year Unisys veteran, CTO Fred Dillman has seen lots of changes in how IT operates. “When IT was growing, it was all about making improvements in the business, but after a while they got enamored with their own technology,” Dillman says. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Keeping track of tools the wireless way “Who has that damn cart now?” During a network build-out for a large New York commercial real estate manager a few years back, that phrase got shouted often enough to become a stress mantra. May 29, 3:00 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 Imagining a day without Microsoft Did you ever hear the warning, “be careful what you wish for, it might come true?” Well, because Microsoft is the company most people love to hate, I decided to ask a cross section of industry cognoscenti this simple question: What would happen if Microsoft and all of its technology disappeared tomorrow? May 23, 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 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 Tech startups to watch Startups are back! or at least, startup fever is back. Scan the latest numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers and you won’t find any hockey sticks -- the level of investment in enterprise-related technology startups has actually remained fairly flat, hovering between $1.5 and $2.3 billion per quarter from 2003 through 2005. May 15, 3:00 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 Filling the void left by baby-boomer techies The big exodus is getting closer and closer. The baby boomers are about to retire in droves. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 50. In the next 10 years, 43 percent of the workforce will be eligible for retirement, while the next two generations are about 15 percent smaller. February 28, 3:00 a.m. PST Orange targets SMBs with mobile apps European mobile phone operator Orange has launched a new mobile application portal to reach out to small businesses. February 16, 3:26 a.m. PST SAP steps into the software-as-a-service arena It’s as momentous as when the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific and the final, golden, spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, completing the transcontinental railroad -- not that in high tech anyone would notice an event as significant. I can’t even predict for you all the innovations that will be generated from the recent developments, but I will give you my thoughts. January 31, 3:00 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 Top technologies of the year Welcome to our first issue of the year. For those of you who took a break, re-entry into the heady universe of work may be a bit discombobulating. Fortunately, last Saturday, the world’s ever-considerate timekeepers saw fit to give us an extra sliver of time -- a leap second-- to prep for the new year. And now, with the pop of the cork (or was that the buzz of a pager?), we’re ready to herald 2006, a potential banner year for the enterprise. January 2, 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 Microsoft launches upgrade of project-based software A new version of Microsoft's project-based business management software, called Dynamics SL 6.5, will be available Monday in the U.S. and Canada, the company said Thursday. December 16, 4:31 a.m. PST Microsoft to buy portfolio management software Microsoft said Friday it plans to acquire software and intellectual property from UMT, a software and consulting firm based in New York that specializes in portfolio management software. December 16, 4:18 a.m. PST Software as a service moves beyond the sales force There’s no denying that SaaS (software as a service) and Salesforce.com have together reshaped the CRM segment of enterprise software. I’ve written about the pluses and minuses of SaaS before. This time I thought I would look at some other software categories where SaaS will have a major impact, including PLM (product lifecycle management) and project/portfolio management. November 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Hardware isn't enough IT buyers live in a golden age of commodity hardware. Processors, servers, networks, storage, you name it: Every segment of the IT stack keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more commoditized. No surprise, then, that IT managers often resort to a checkbook-waving strategy, throwing hardware at every IT problem, from a balky WAN to an application speed bump. November 28, 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 British American Tobacco builds SOA one step at a time For British American Tobacco (BAT), SOA success came early. The challenge now lies in determining how quickly SOA should be scaled across the enterprise, and for which functions. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Making SOA work Implementing SOA (service-oriented architecture) is one of the most daunting projects that an enterprise IT organization can undertake. Service orientation represents a whole new way of thinking and doing, one that changes the way developers operate and interact with the business. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Toolkits for user innovation Technology trends obey certain predictable laws, among them that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. So the recent backlash directed at AJAX and other "Web 2.0" technologies was no surprise. November 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft loses key members of MSN, Office teams Microsoft Corp. is losing key members of its MSN and Office teams, the company confirmed late Tuesday. October 26, 10:25 a.m. PDT Are CIOs headed for extinction? Is the CIO a dinosaur? Will it be an extinct position in a few short years? Merial, a large animal health care enterprise co-owned by Merck and sanofi-aventis, believes so; in fact, it's already buried the title. I spoke with Steve Lerner, IS director at Merial, about what led to its decision to eliminate the CIO position. The answer, in short, is Sarbanes-Oxley. October 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT SAP promotes ESA ecosystem Customers, software developers and other partners attending SAP AG's TechEd workshop in Vienna are being urged to embrace the company's new Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), which has moved out of the lab and into the enterprise. September 21, 8:41 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 Sprint rationalizes its infrastructure with SOA As far back as four years ago, Sprint’s IT staff was already headed toward SOA (service-oriented architecture). They just didn’t know it yet. September 12, 4:00 a.m. PDT IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 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 CRM The open source community can't provide a drop-in replacement for expensive, high-end CRM applications from the likes of Salesforce.com or Siebel just yet. Still, you might be surprised at the level of sophistication some of the available projects already offer, particularly for midsize organizations. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Brightidea opens channels for innovation To be successful these days companies must constantly produce innovative products and services. Brilliant people are, of course, essential to forging groundbreaking solutions. As important, however, are the means to disseminate fresh ideas quickly and to ensure the best among them are not stalled by lengthy approval processes. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source on Windows -- an unholy alliance? I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I’m trying out an unfamiliar open source component, I cheat. Even if the software I’m working on will deploy to Linux, I’ll sometimes develop it on Windows first. July 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT Can contracts survive in the grassroots ecosystem? My documentary on the evolution of Wikipedia’s heavy metal umlaut page has been the most popular screencast I’ve made. It investigates the sociology of Wikipedia-style collaboration, but it also explores the dynamics of the underlying version control system. June 29, 5:00 a.m. PDT Mercury updates IT Governance Center Mercury Interactive has recently updated its IT Governance Center software, adding to the new 6.0 version additional forecasting features and expanded dashboard functionality. May 3, 9:42 a.m. PDT What TimeDance got right Most of the meetings I schedule cross organizational borders and doing so is always a painful process. Everyone feels the same pain to one degree or another and has felt it for years. Ad-hoc collaboration across borders is at the core of the agile enterprise’s mission, but we still lack the tools to do it easily and effectively. April 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT An irresistible supply-chain story Want to hear what could be one of the best supply-chain success stories ever? Take the $4 billion commercial and consumer equipment division of a $20 billion company, reduce inventory by $500 million, and as sales grow, keep inventory constant -- thus avoiding an additional $500 million in inventory. This is what John Deere did starting in 2002, with the help of supply-chain optimization software vendor SmartOps. April 19, 5:00 a.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 Demand-driven manufacturing: Burn those spreadsheets The Aberdeen Group says that 92 percent of all manufacturers use spreadsheets for production planning and scheduling. I spoke with See’s Candy, a chocolate manufacturer with about 200 wholly-owned retail outlets, mostly on the West Coast, and Wise Foods, the East Coast’s premier potato chip manufacturer, which has more than 400 potato chip SKUs. Both companies recently gave up their spreadsheets and transitioned to a single platform for production planning, packaging, and inventory management. March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST IBM buys Canadian project portfolio management vendor IBM Corp. has agreed to buy Montreal software developer Systemcorp ALG for an undisclosed sum, the companies said Tuesday. October 12, 8:39 a.m. PDT Microsoft provides Project Server 2003-SAP link Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday made available a connector kit that allows users to easily link Microsoft's Office Project Server 2003 with SAP AG's ERP (enterprise resource planning) products. September 16, 4:41 a.m. PDT Autodesk tackles project collaboration Autodesk this week unwrapped an updated version of its hosted project collaboration service targeted at the construction and manufacturing industries. Autodesk Buzzsaw lets multiple, dispersed project participants -- including building owners, developers, architects, construction teams, and facility managers -- share and manage data throughout the life of a project, according to Autodesk officials. August 11, 3:29 p.m. PDT Will open source software for Windows catch on? Behavioral scientists will tell you that in the animal kingdom -- which includes Homo sapiens -- truly altruistic behavior is extremely rare, if it exists at all. Yet even behavior motivated by self-interest can work for the public good. There’s a cadre of historians who believes that the framers of the U.S. Constitution wrote it to protect their own landed interests, for example, yet few would deny that it worked out pretty well for the rest of us. July 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT Hosted collaboration steps to the plate Hosted collaboration services from vendors Documentum, Intuit, and SiteScape are expanding to give enterprise workgroups improved project control and finer-grained user management. June 28, 6:00 a.m. PDT Rally racing into managing developers Rally Software Development on Thursday will introduce Rally Release 1, a Web-based service for managing software development projects based on “agile” programming methodologies. June 23, 4:25 p.m. PDT Microsoft bumps business apps group up hierarchy Microsoft Corp. is tweaking the organizational structure around its Microsoft Business Solutions group, announcing Thursday that group leader Doug Burgum will now report directly to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. The change gives the business applications unit a more prominent position in Microsoft's hierarchy. June 3, 10:12 a.m. PDT Startup ITM aims to help IT manage its own business A startup founded by former IT executives Monday announced a set of software packages that aim to give CIOs (chief information officers) management tools on a par with those long available for finance and other corporate functions. May 24, 4:03 p.m. PDT IDC: Pressure continues to build on IT managers SINGAPORE - IT managers are facing a period of unprecedented pressure as their challenges increase but senior company executives try to hold down IT budgets, according to Peter Hind [cq], manager, end user programs, IDC South Pacific. April 23, 6:08 a.m. PDT Innovate, or take a walk The theme for Ahead of the Curve this year is individual innovation, and I didn’t choose that theme at random. The IT economy is marginalizing and will permanently shed those who don’t bring creativity, curiosity, and invention to their jobs. April 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT PeopleSoft extends Linux support to software PeopleSoft Inc. will support Red Hat Linux for PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne, meaning that customers who choose to run their applications on Linux can reduce their total cost of ownership by using an open source, secure, and stable operating system, the company says. April 13, 8:44 a.m. PDT Is my job still relevant? All of us in IT are in the unfortunate position of having to justify our existence. April 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Applications |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
