11/01/2002
Get the Message!
Unified communications keeps your users in touch.
Columns
Like it or not, instant messaging (IM) is one communication tool that's here to stay. Many users are ecstatic about IM: It's quicker than e-mail and less intrusive than the telephone. It's also riddled with security challenges.
101 is taking some of the strongest and most popular portions of ES and rolling them into a new publication that will focus on business intelligence.
To cope with burgeoning data and its management, a naming system is exactly where we need to begin—to enable truly effective storage management.
What exactly is .NET? A consultant with a leading IT services firm I recently spoke with likened Microsoft's .NET vision to "a spell-checker for rent over the Internet for Word." Another analyst views it as a Windows-preservation strategy in a world moving to Web services—and potential platform independence. Maybe Microsoft hasn't done a good job explaining .NET, or maybe the software giant wants to keep the concept in a formless state until it sees what the market is willing to pay for.
What do you get when you cross a peer-to-peer (p-to-p) network (mostly used for trading pirated music and pornography) with a highly redundant server cluster (mostly used for mission-critical applications in Fortune 500 companies)? The answer: grid computing.
In-Depth
Unisea, one of the world's leading fish product processing companies, turned to Sitekeeper from Executive Software Inc. to help them better manage and track software updates and licences.
A spring storm forced the state of Connecticut to undergo a $15 million move to a new data center with Voice over IP, improved network performance, and better mainframe and server maintenance.
The University of Wisconsin needed to replace legacy homegrown mainframe software, written in COBOL on a Bull mainframe, with Web-based software. It now runs Sun servers hosting Oracle databases.
Novell needed to send customers formatted sales documents worldwide via e-mail or fax; it found the answer in StreamServe's Business Communications Platform.
With 60 million mobile workers in the country, wireless computing has been a technology waiting to boom. That wait will soon be over.
Proper planning and adequate help enable the director of information services for On Assignment Inc. to put DSL in 70 offices.
For a business that lives off demand for printed documents, the paper industry has spent a lot of time trying to banish paper documents from its own processes.
In consolidating nine data centers worldwide to one location, Parker Hannifin International chooses to go with a vendor it knows well.
A specialty baked goods company was losing online sales because of a Web site that couldn't handle peak holiday traffic. Solution: It upgraded its existing iSeries (AS/400) computers and created a new Web site running Linux.
Network-based file caching may provide a means for real-time data sharing and disaster recovery in file systems according to storage start-up Tacit Networks.
As the year draws to a close, the “Two Towers” of pain in storage administration—capacity provisioning and backup—remain largely unsolved, despite considerable activity in the industry around these problems. Will vendor efforts yield blockbuster solutions in 2003 or are they just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?
Political instability in India combined with Russia's depth of programming talent makes it an attractive new location from offshore software development.
Users want to go beyond messaging with sophisticated call management and mobile access that saves time and makes them more productive. Here's what IT needs to know.
UC systems, which already come with built-in IP integration, are gradually taking on the characteristics of a more distributed, embedded architecture that fits nicely within the peer-to-peer, software-driven, Web-enabled networking that IP allows.
Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC uses p-to-p software to share data with its partners.
To consolidate over 300 servers in three data centers, the Bank of Montreal turned to IBM, Inrange Technologies and StorageTek.