IT

I spent last week on Mark Hurd's firing, er involuntary resignation, and watched the backstory develop, and it isn't pretty. Hurd was likely the third-hardest guy to fire in Silicon Valley behind Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison -- and yet, at least initially, he seemed to be fired as a result of a fals...

India has joined the list of countries putting the squeeze on Research In Motion, citing security concerns as reason to give them access to the encryption technologies protecting corporate email and messaging services on the BlackBerry platform. The Indian government has reportedly given RIM until A...

EXPERT ADVICE

To Pilot or Not to Pilot Enterprise 2.0?

To drive productivity and organizational effectiveness, a new approach to Enterprise 2.0 is required -- one that puts the business user and business problem at the epicenter to tap an organization's innate social intelligence. In order to reach that level of efficiency and effectiveness, it is neces...

Google announced on Wednesday that it has killed off Google Wave, the sharing and communication Web app it kicked off last year. Wave "has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," wrote Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president of operations. Google won't continue developing Wave as a stand...

Now, more than ever, businesses want to work smarter and outdistance their competition to gain an edge. As a result, many are adopting converged communications technologies such as VoIP, collaboration, workforce mobility, and unified communications to accomplish these objectives. Converged communica...

INSIGHTS

Is the IT Pendulum Winding Down?

If you've been in IT long enough, you've probably heard someone observe that, for as long as there have been computers, there has been a long, slow pendulum swing between centralized and distributed computing paradigms. From mainframes, to remote terminals, to timesharing, to PCs, to client/server,...

As I'm writing this, Microsoft is reporting a solid quarter with sales (or use) exceeding expectations significantly on four keystone products. While Steve Ballmer is clearly not performing at Steve Jobs' incredible levels, Microsoft continues to generate cash at a rate that most companies, states a...

Twitter has announced that it will be working toward consolidating management of its data centers within its own organization. The company's first custom-built data center, located in the Salt Lake City area, will fire up later this year. Twitter will keep its relationship with NTT America to mainta...

Just a few weeks ago, Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center learned a hard lesson. If you didn't see the news reports, the N.Y.-based healthcare provider notified over 130,000 individuals that their records -- including diagnostic information, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and other i...

Microsoft has put its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system out for technical preview. "Starting today, thousands of prototype phones from Asus, LG and Samsung are making their way into the hands of developers over the next few weeks," Terry Myerson, corporate vice president, Windows phone enginee...

HP has delayed the launch of its Android tablet device, All Things Digital reported on Thursday. The tablet had been scheduled for release at the end of the year. It's believed HP is pushing back work on the Android device in order to focus on a tablet running webOS, the operating system it acquired...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released its final version of rules that define the parameters under which physicians and hospitals can qualify for funding to upgrade their electronic medical records systems. Included are new definitions for what will constitute "meaningful use"...

Microsoft on Monday announced the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools beta; this was followed on Tuesday with the announcement of WinPho7 integration with the Windows Live and Zune services. The moves come as Microsoft works to consolidate its mobile efforts around the Windows Phone 7 platf...

YouTube's decision to make its mobile Web site compatible with HTML5 may one day be viewed as a turning point in what is shaping up as an epic battle for control of the mobile device landscape. In unveiling the new site on Wednesday, YouTube said its goal is to give mobile device users the same vide...

Windows OS High Availability is a tricky part of your disaster recovery planning. Many Microsoft and third-Party server tools and platforms come with some form of native HA toolset, and for the larger portion of these, Microsoft Cluster or Failover Clustering are the tool of choice. Enterprises ma...

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