eWEEK Labs Names the Top Products of 2010

By eWEEK Labs

It was the hottest thing in computing since the original Apple Macintosh. It was an evergreen topic of conversation, from its unveiling in the first week of January 2010 to holiday dinners at year’s end. It is already changing the landscape of mobile computing and inspiring numerous imitators.It, as you may have guessed, is the Apple iPad. It is our Product of the Year.

Cisco CleanAir, a spectrum analysis feature set comprising recent-generation Aironet 3500 series access points and Version 7.x Unified Wireless Network software on the APs and Wireless LAN Controllers, delivers outstanding RF (radio frequency) reporting, tracking and assessment capabilities to help wireless administrators build robust wireless networks to host mission-critical applications and dense endpoint deployments.

In 2010 Cisco turned on yet another new feature in the Nexus 7000 platform that basically eliminates the ancient and universally deployed spanning tree protocol from network designs, thus enabling much larger Layer 2 networking domains within the data center. The FabricPath Switching System is the foundation of a push by Cisco to combine NX-OS software features with the hardware capabilities of the Nexus 7000 F1 series module to build the next generation of high-performance network systems.

Microsoft Office for Mac took a wrong turn with the 2008 release, Microsoft got back on the right track this year when the company released Office for Mac 2011, with a Mac version of Outlook and the return of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) support to Apple desktops and notebooks.

One of our favorite products of the year was Microsoft’s free add-in for Excel 2010, PowerPivot. The tool, which adds a new sort of spreadsheet option to Excel, first grabbed our attention for the way it enables users to work with much larger sets of data than is possible with Excel alone.

Whether it’s consumed directly from Red Hat or in the form of one of its downstream incarnations, such as the freely available CentOS or Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux, the innovations and enhancements that go into RHEL have a major impact on the IT world.

Rove Mobile Admin proved to be an excellent way for data center administrators to extend enterprise network oversight and controls outside of the office, providing a mobile presentation layer for various enterprise applications and systems that can be accessed via most popular modern smartphone operating systems.

In our tests of Chatter, which is included in the Winter ’11 release of all Salesforce.com editions, it became clear that Chatter fulfills my requirements for a business-class communication tool that can be securely and reliably used to promote social interaction without losing control of the business opportunities that are the subject of conversation.

Virtual desktop infrastructure products have a harder row to hoe when compared with their server counterparts. VMware View 4.5, however, stepped up in September with enterprise features that enable local mode and workload customization features for $250 per concurrent user. The View Enterprise regular edition without local mode costs $150 per concurrent user.