InfoWorld articles from March 2007

InfoWorld archives from March 2007

ENTERPRISE INSIGHT: Tolerating online fraud - Laissez-faire attitudes toward security abound, as one money-making hand washes the other.(Editorial)
March 5, 2007... Whenever I see someone turning the other cheek to a problem, I smile and think of the greatest golden retriever I've ever known, a family dog named Kayo who was a very strong swimmer. Kayo would be paddling out in the San Francisco Bay,...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: Dark days before Daylight Savings - With March 11 just around the corner, you need your systems prepped and patched now.
March 5, 2007... Guess this is the big week to write about the Daylight Savings Time snafu. For those who might have missed it, DST starts on March 11 this year -- three weeks earlier than usual -- and ends on November 4, a week later than usual. It's a mite...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: One PC switcher's tale - Every day, around 9,000 people switch to the Mac. Here begins a unique test case.(Column)
March 5, 2007... By my calculations, based on Steve Jobs' claim that half of all Macs are sold to first-time buyers, roughly 9,000 people switch to the Mac every day. They're buying new iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, most of which come in at...

REALITY CHECK: The benefits of a fast close - IT can help the finance department get its closing numbers to Wall Street faster.(Editorial)
March 5, 2007... 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...

OFF THE RECORD: When lawyers use Napster at work - Take an open network, add file sharing, and you've got a security hole big enough for a battleship.(Column)
March 5, 2007... By Anonymous Some years ago, I got a job doing network support for the District Attorney's office in a large city that shall remain nameless. When I arrived, the network was a mess! Malware was rampant, Internet and WAN connections were...

Is that code really yours? Black Duck protexIP helps protect against license violations, but detection errors limit its usefulness.
March 5, 2007... As open source software pushes its way further into the enterprise, a new set of risks has arisen regarding IP (intellectual property). The problem is that developers happily borrow code from various projects to save themselves from having to...

IT as a service: taking care of business - To play a truly strategic role, the modern IT organization must run itself as a separate operation. Here's how four enterprises are reinventing the relationship between business and IT.(Purdue University, Thomson Corp. Thomson Financial, Mary Kay Cosmetics Inc. and Oakland city council)
March 5, 2007... More and more organizations are transforming their IT departments into self-sustaining business units, treating internal users as if they were external customers. And for good reason, says Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Enterprise...

Game plan for Team SOA - You need all the backing you can get, both personal and logistical, to get an SOA initiative off the ground.(service oriented architecture)(Editorial)
March 5, 2007... Like any structure, governance needs a solid foundation. In the case of SOA, the trick is to get the right people involved and engage in some good old-fashioned fact finding, so you know exactly what you're dealing with. Job No. 1 is...

Teaming up for SOA - Governance policies chiseled in stone aren't SOA, they're DOA. Here's how to keep governance collaborative and effective.(service oriented architecture )
March 5, 2007... Most organizations start down the road to SOA with a pilot project of some kind. The result is often a great technology learning experience and a handful of useful services upon which a related set of apps can be built and modified easily. But...

Deploying Microsoft Office 2007 - Despite what you might hear, the process is trickier than you might hope.
March 5, 2007... A Microsoftee will tell you that deploying Office 2007 is as simple as adding it to a WIM (Windows Imaging Format) file. Theoretically, we don't disagree, but practically, no way, no how. You'll need additional tools for this job, and the best...

Microsoft tools ease Vista deployment - Free software reduces the stress of the OS upgrade.
March 5, 2007... Vista is more than just a pretty face; Redmond has sweated serious bullets making it a business-friendly operating system. A key difference between this Windows and XP Pro is that Microsoft is challenging customers to deploy the OS in a...

Privacy laws could hurt the little guy - Whitfield Diffie discusses security and public key cryptography.
March 5, 2007... Whitfield Diffie has been credited with making privacy possible in the digital age. As a co-inventor of public key cryptography, he is one of the most respected contributors to the field of computer security and is in constant demand as a...

EDITOR'S LETTER: More IT war stories - Off the Record blog will help you find your inner Dilbert.
March 5, 2007... 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,...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: Free software is nothing to fear - Enlightened software companies and customers are turning away from watered-down open source.(Editorial)
March 5, 2007... Nat Torkington stirred up some controversy when he asked, "Is 'Open Source' Now Completely Meaningless?" He has a good point, however. With so many companies claiming to be "open source" -- despite seemingly disparate business models and...

STORAGE INSIDER: Can HPC become a commodity? HP's acquisition of PolyServe suggests commoditization is possible, but some assembly is still required.
March 5, 2007... My first reaction when I heard the news of HP signing on the dotted line to acquire PolyServe was: "What took them so long?" The two companies have been partners for quite some time, and there was a "high degree of potential synergy"...

SECURITY ADVISER: Reflections of a 20-year IT security veteran - New job, same goals: Improve computer security, protect end-users.
March 5, 2007... As I announced in my blog last week, I recently accepted a job as a senior security consultant with Microsoft's ACE (Application Consulting and Engineering) team. After 20 years of computer security consulting, much of it on Windows...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Vista's audio woes, Wikipedia steps on toes - Maybe five years isn't long enough between new operating systems.(Column)
March 5, 2007... Vista looks better than it sounds for unhappy Dell users who thought they bought Creative Audigy sound cards with their new laptops. When they upgraded to Vista, users discovered they'd really purchased Audigy software, which wasn't compatible...

Improve availability of enterprise data - For those striving to avoid system downtime, change is enemy No. 1.
March 12, 2007... Ask an expert about data availability and how to ensure it, and the conversation quickly turns to the subject of human error. Not that IT mistakes are the leading cause of unplanned downtime; the research firm Gartner identifies software...

seeMore makes order out of data chaos - Virtual Database Server gathers multiple databases under one relational roof, accessible via standard interfaces.(Editorial)
March 12, 2007... Imagine if you will: you are the chief database administrator for a large corporation. Your organization's databases are on different continents, which has never been a problem. What is a problem is that those databases have been written by...

Information on demand: the new enterprise goal - IBM research director targets tedium in most IT work.(Ambuj Goyal )(Interview)
March 12, 2007... Dr. Ambuj Goyal is one of IBM's heavy hitters. A 25-year IBM veteran who joined the company as a researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center, Goyal did early work in scalable databases that laid the technology groundwork for DB2, then led...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: Are you an open source user or joiner? How a company engages the community matters more than its business model.(Column)
March 12, 2007... In my previous column, I touched on the issue of what constitutes an open-source vendor. Ask Andy Astor that question, and his answer is a shrug. "Honestly," he says, "who cares?" To Astor, there are really two broad categories of companies...

EDITOR'S LETTER: Timely coverage - The Feds weren't thinking about IT when they moved daylight-saving time.(Editorial)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Usually daylight-saving time is no big deal. We "spring ahead," grumble briefly about an hour of lost sleep, and get on with life. This year could be different. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 advanced DST by three weeks, forcing IT managers into...

STORAGE INSIDER: Betting on top storage speed - Intransa steers their boat toward performance intensive SAN applications.(storage area networks)
March 12, 2007... Some areas of the storage market are crowded with too many similar products. Think, for example, of clustered IP SANs -- it's something of a niche segment, but it's vibrant with competing solutions from vendors like EqualLogic, Intransa, and...

SECURITY ADVISER: Have you read your regulations? Don't assume everything you're told is true when it comes to compliance specifics -- do your homework and find out what's legit and what's bull.
March 12, 2007... I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospital's patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendor's normal Web site was...

ENTERPRISE INSIGHT: Crisis management 101 - Preparing for disaster means preparing yourself to act decisively when little is known.(Editorial)
March 12, 2007... I recently participated in some war-game-style what-if exercises with a small group of IT execs. The goal was to stimulate thinking about how corporations can best prepare for, and respond to, significant business disruptions, whether from...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Microsoft can't do the time, Apple store aids in crime - It's the end of the world as we know it -- one more time.
March 12, 2007... Some Cringesters are reporting a Y2K-esque experience trying to update their Outlook calendars to deal with the March 11 daylight-saving time switcheroo. Microsoft has a novella-length knowledge base article detailing the precise steps needed...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: The Green Grid gets going - Energy-efficient IT is finally getting a boost from many major vendors.(Column)
March 12, 2007... Pleas to improve datacenter power-efficiency tend to be vague: Consolidate to fewer and more efficient systems; use virtualization to allocate resources based on need; and choose microprocessors, infrastructure components, and system...

OFF THE RECORD: Caught in an endless loop of coding and recoding - How many times do you have to rewrite the same application before the cash register rings?(Column)
March 12, 2007... By Anonymous Every development shop has issues. The first company I ever worked for had no testing cycle, and no mechanism for bringing users into the design process. Code went directly from the developers' hard drives into the hands...

REALITY CHECK: Tech 101 for startups - How a new breed of entrepreneur is tapping technology to succeed in nontech sectors.
March 12, 2007... "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. So says Tod...

Improve the quality of enterprise data - Ensuring data quality is always harder than it seems, but new tools are making the toughest task in IT a bit easier.
March 12, 2007... When I was a young programmer at an investment bank, my desk was next to the department of "data integrity," a small group with the thankless job of making sure that the databases held accurate records of stock transactions. The bank's...

Secure your enterprise data - Regulations and a fear of banner headlines put the focus on data, not network, security.(E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. accused for disclosing trade secrets)
March 12, 2007... For DuPont, Gary Min may have seemed a model employee. A research chemist at DuPont's research laboratory in Circleville, Ohio, Min was a naturalized U.S. citizen with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania who had worked for DuPont...

Your Web site's secret weapon - Once mere Web accelerators, content distribution networks now offer a range of useful services.(Kenexa Technologies Inc. contracts with Akamai Technologies Inc.)
March 19, 2007... Kenexa, a global provider of talent-hiring and-retention services and software, had a serious customer-satisfaction problem. "Our Web-based recruiter application worked fine in the [United States], but with each packet taking 200 to 240...

CSG-2500 stands firm against malware - Network defender can carry a heavy load, though reporting and protocol support are lacking.(CP Secure )
March 19, 2007... Not too long ago, all a network admin had to do to ensure that the network was "clean" was to schedule a weekly virus scan and confirm the virus signatures were up to date. This kind of protection was sufficient when the attack vector was based...

All-in-one backup for SMBs - Breece Hill BizGuardian bridges tape and disk-based data protection.(Breece Hill Technologies Inc.)
March 19, 2007... Choosing a proper backup solution can be a challenging task for a small business that may lack the time and skill to implement a winning mix of backup application, tape device, and intermediate disk layer. If ever there were a niche that cried...

Linux rising at IBM - Scott Handy talks about the future of open source at Big Blue.(Interview)
March 19, 2007... Scott Handy started with IBM in 1983 as a systems engineer and did the scenic tour of the company's sales, marketing, and strategic planning operations. Through the years, he's covered large accounts, channels, small and midsize business, and...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: Dell takes baby steps toward Linux - Top PC vendor answers customers' demand for open source, tentatively.
March 19, 2007... Thanks to Dell, soon it will be easier than ever to order a brand-new desktop or notebook PC with Linux pre-installed. But whether Dell's new program will really have an impact on the rate of Linux adoption in the enterprise is unclear at best....

EDITOR'S LETTER: VoIP's mad scientist - I wanted a conventional review; our reviewer had a different idea.(voice over ip)(Editorial)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... Some stories are a labor of love. "Open Source VoIP Makes the Business Connection" is one of them. The love, in this case, originates with Senior Contributing Editor Paul Venezia. Here's the back story: In late 2006, we began planning an...

SECURITY ADVISER: Real-world IT security challenges: Doing away with passwords - It's RSA and Citrix to the rescue when a company wants to move to more secure login methods.(Editorial)(Column)
March 19, 2007... Today's column starts an ongoing periodic feature where I'll be covering various real-world scenarios I've come across in my professional consulting life. We're talking about real-world solutions for real-world security problems. When it...

STORAGE INSIDER: In search of a laptop that plays it safe - New tamper- resistant laptop blends data security features from ASI, Seagate, and Wave Systems.(Column)
March 19, 2007... I travel rather often, but I am not a BlackBerry person. When on the road, I need the same tools and computing power that I use at the office, and only a laptop can provide that. Those handhelds just won't cut it for me. Do I have...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Intel mislays its mail, ASUS batteries fail - Bad things happen when the elite delete.
March 19, 2007... AMD says Intel loves the delete key a little too much. Several hundred e-mails from top Intel insiders have gone missing due to "inadvertent mistakes," which, the company assures us, have nothing to do with AMD's antitrust suit against it....

ENTERPRISE INSIGHT: Tech tops the pop charts - Music-video paean to Web 2.0 burns up YouTube, puts machines at the center of personal expression.
March 19, 2007... Remember the adrenaline rush when you first saw MTV in 1981? When they played "She Blinded Me With Science" in '83? Well, if you want a fresh, geeky, thought-provoking video experience that gets your heart pumping, check out "Web 2.0... The...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Mac sense and nonsense - A Windows professional finds the Mac to be irresistible until she launches applications.(Column)
March 19, 2007... A couple of columns ago, I introduced you to a friend and lifelong professional Windows user who agreed to let me observe and document her trial run at switching to the Mac. I set her up with a can't-lose bargain: She would swap her desktop...

OFF THE RECORD: How 'the suits' destroyed a billion-dollar company - They looked good in their Armanis, but their mishandling of the business wasn't a pretty sight.(Strat-a-Gee)(Column)
March 19, 2007... By Anonymous In the early 1990s I landed a job with "Strat-a-Gee," a hugely successful VAR (value-added reseller) on the East Coast. Our growth was enormous. By Y2K we had gone from 100 employees to more than 1,600 -- and nearly a billion...

REALITY CHECK: Recipe for disaster - Technology can help prevent food contamination -- but only if IT gets involved.(Editorial)
March 19, 2007... There have been so many food contamination episodes in the past several months -- tainted spinach at the supermarket, bad green onions at Taco Bell, salmonella in our beloved peanut butter, courtesy of Peter Pan -- that I decided to do a little...

APC's good Big Brother - Capable NetBotz monitoring system usefully combines multiple sensors and surveillance.
March 19, 2007... How's the weather in your datacenter? Could you pull up a time line graph of temperature, humidity, and maybe even video footage of the room on a whim? Using APC's NetBotz monitoring appliances and InfraStruXure Central management console, you...

Adventures in Asterisk deployment - Wherein the author rolls up his sleeves and embarks on his own open source VoIP odyssey.
March 19, 2007... It seems I eat so much of my own dog food these days that I don't have time to enjoy a nice steak every now and again. My experience with Asterisk hasn't been any different. [ Watch the screencast: Inside Trixbox 2.0 ] Because I see...

Lending ear to open source VoIP - With interest in Asterisk on the rise, commercial IP phone vendors embrace SIP.(voice over ip, session initiation protocol)
March 19, 2007... Whereas commercial VoIP vendors typically supply their own phones, tying them to their IP PBXes for solid integration and providing phone setup, configuration, and maintenance as part of their packages, when it comes to deploying an open source...

Case study: Asterisk proves its worth - Looking to expand its phone operations, Summer Bay Resorts called on Asterisk -- and the open source IP PBX delivered.
March 19, 2007... Despite Digium's current positioning of Asterisk for the midmarket, plenty of large-scale implementations speak to the scalability and versatility of the open source IP PBX. One such rollout -- that of Summer Bay Resorts, a time-share vacation...

Do-it-yourself content distribution - Appliance- and software-based options for internal corporate WANs.
March 19, 2007... Content delivery networks make a lot of sense if you need to accelerate the delivery of video, content, and applications over the public Internet, but what about internal corporate WANs? "CDNs and ADNs are for folks who need to leverage the...

Open source VoIP makes the business connection - Thanks to worthwhile IP PBX alternatives such as Asterisk, open source VoIP is ready for targeted enterprise deployment.(voice over ip)
March 19, 2007... Nearly three years since Jon "maddog" Hall predicted that "VoIP using an open source solution, such as Asterisk, will generate more business than the entire Linux marketplace today," open source VoIP for the enterprise remains a wild frontier....

A bullish outlook for Longhorn security - If Microsoft follows through on its promises, Longhorn's security push could put Vista's efforts to shame.(Microsoft Longhorn Server)
March 26, 2007... Vista's security advances may be ambitious, but they could seem ho-hum in comparison to those of Longhorn when the server OS stampedes onto the scene later this year. The last time we saw Longhorn it was still prebeta 3, but its security...

Desktop virtualization tools vie for position - Four competing solutions from Microsoft, VMware, Parallels, and InnoTek demonstrate potential and the need to grow.(Microsoft Virtual PC 2007)(Parallels Workstation for Windows 2.2)(VirtualBox 1.3)(VMware Workstation 6.0.3)(Product/service evaluation)
March 26, 2007... Long ago, before the era of hardware slices and server farms, virtualization was a desktop thing. From SoftPC to Windows on Windows, desktop virtualization was primarily a tool for developers and support personnel... people who had a...

Light makes right for virtual machine performance - Lightweight solutions deliver best results.(testing virtual machines)(Editorial)(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... Runtime performance is an aspect of virtual machine qualification that often goes overlooked. Many IT shops wrongly assume that virtualization performance is tied to the underlying hardware, discounting the impact of the controlling virtual...

McAfee CEO: Proud to be pure-play - David DeWalt may face tough questions from investors and market watchers.(Interview)
March 26, 2007... As the fourth new president at McAfee in the past six years, and also its newest CEO, former EMC executive David DeWalt will face a lot of questions about how and why he will succeed where those before him did not. To be fair: Some of the...

EDITOR'S LETTER: Writers take the heat - Columnists stir up controversy, endure their share of reader ire.(Editorial)(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... It happens every year. Tom Yager writes another column about Apple, and I get e-mails like this one from reader Gary Olson: "I find it a bit unfair for a magazine of your caliber to carry an avowed Apple advocate's column...and not a similar...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: Mr. Gates, tear down these walls - Fruitless persecution of open source achieves nothing but harm.(Bill Gates)(Editorial)
March 26, 2007... IBM's latest filing in the SCO case looks particularly damning; it may finally be curtains for SCO. But even if the judge dismisses the suit tomorrow, Linux customers won't be able to rest easy. As Bruce Perens reminds us, the Microsoft/Novell...

SECURITY ADVISER: LoJack for laptops - With more data security breaches involving stolen mobile devices, it's time to seriously consider remote tracking technologies.(Editorial)
March 26, 2007... I just love some of these security news stories. For example: Police in Bellevue, Washington have been fighting a large car theft crime spree. One of the tools in their arsenal is remote-controlled, life-sized cars, including a regular-looking...

STORAGE INSIDER: Getting compliance out of the datacenter - New partnership between AXS-One and EDS suggests outsourcing to cope with the regulatory burden.
March 26, 2007... Every now and then I have to touch on compliance -- not because I like the topic, but because it has quickly become a significant aspect of data management and, therefore, of storage. Companies are today much more aware of regulatory...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Microsoft issues bribes, Vista nixes drives - What do you do when playing the bully no longer works?
March 26, 2007... If you can't beat 'em, bribe 'em. That's Microsoft's newest tactic for promoting Windows Live Search, whose share of the market is declining despite a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign and the best efforts of the sultry Ms. Dewey. The...

ENTERPRISE INSIGHT: HP to buy Symantec? A misdirected missive that, when considered, might just illuminate a worthwhile match.
March 26, 2007... I just got a mysterious one-line BlackBerry message from a well-placed tech-industry figure. It was a single, terse question in the subject line, no body: "Do you think HP will make a play for Symantec?... I do." I'm pretty sure the...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Where x86 hits the wall - Virtualization and heavily multi-threaded software expose the limits of x86 parallelism.(Column)
March 26, 2007... Your desktop computer is fast. It's faster than you can type, faster than you can browse, and unlike you, it can do many things at once. Sure, you multitask. You can be on a conference call with your boss while you're buffing your nails, but...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: Protect mobile data from all sides - From implementing security tools to developing policies, guarding sensitive data is straightforward and essential.(Editorial)
March 26, 2007... Hear ye, hear ye! Once again, we're making the annual call for Stupid Human Tricks. You know all those anecdotes you have about users who committed truly brain-challenged acts that radiated to massive problems for the rest of the network?...

REALITY CHECK: Calculating the cost of SaaS - Pay-as-you-go pricing might just mean forgoing software as a service altogether.(software as a service)
March 26, 2007... This week I thought as a public service i would lay out the real cost of deploying a SaaS (software as a service) solution, starting with a look at two major SaaS providers, Salesforce.com and NetSuite, both of which offer CRM solutions. ...

OFF THE RECORD: How I started my IT career - Choosing between school and career can be tricky, unless you find a way to do both.(Column)
March 26, 2007... By Anonymous I've worked in IT for so long that whole segments of my career tend to blur out. But I can tell you exactly when it started. I was enrolled in a computer science program at a university in upstate New York, but I was only...

Has Microsoft kept its Vista security promise? The blogosphere is all over Vista security. Here's our crack at sorting the real flaws from the anti-Microsoft hysteria.(Editorial)
March 26, 2007... According to Microsoft, it's the most secure operating system the company has ever produced. Five years in the making, Windows Vista promises to lock down the desktop and usher in the era of "trustworthy computing," in which PCs are more...

Reinvigorated Java IDEs change the development landscape - Java IDEs have improved steadily over the last few years. Products from IBM, Borland, and Sun show just how far they've come.(IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software 7.0)(JBuilder 2007 Enterprise Edition)(Sun NetBeans 5.5)(Integrated Development Environment)(Product/service evaluation)
March 26, 2007... Java IDEs are one of the most used app dev tools in corporate development. They are also among the most capable developer products on the market. With that in mind, it's time to ask yourself: Are you using the Java IDE best suited to your...