Anne Chen

As organizations sought ways to control IT costs in 2004, IT managers increasingly considered open-source alternatives. Ive made various predictions about the rise of open-source software within enterprises. And while Linuxs success in the server arena has been obvious for some time now, it is open-source desktop software that (finally!) began to gain real ground […]

When the IT staff for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools system needed to provide more than 10,000 students with anytime, anywhere computing, it turned to server-based computing and deployed thin clients in schools and offices. With applications available at the server level, students and educators can now access applications and files from school and at […]

Deploying thin clients may not result in cost savings for every organization, but small and midsize businesses looking for a robust, fairly powerful dumb-terminal experience can find it in Hewlett-Packard Co.s Compaq t5510 and t5710 Thin Client systems. Click here to read the full review of HPs Compaq t5510 and t5710. 2 Deploying thin clients […]

OpenOffice.orgs namesake suite turned 4 last month, and in a sign of just how far the open-source productivity suite has come, a commercially supported version of the software for Windows is now available. Flexiety last month began offering a $49.95 boxed version of OpenOffice.org with support at CompUSA stores in Texas, the San Francisco Bay […]

Users seeking a way to discover and capture random information will find that EverNote Corp.s EverNote 1.0 is very much up to the task. In eWEEK Labs tests of EverNote 1.0 beta code, we were impressed by its versatility and find it to be a promising solution—particularly for organizations looking for an alternative to Microsoft […]

The Mozilla Foundations release of Firefox 1.0 earlier this month reignited the browser wars on consumer desktops. But on corporate machines, the free open-source browser faces an uphill battle in its effort to challenge Microsoft Corp.s dominant Internet Explorer. eWEEK Labs spoke with a number of IT managers who applaud Firefox 1.0 as a viable […]

When it comes to upgrading the worlds largest payment processing system, failure is not an option, said Scott Thompson, executive vice president of Visa Internationals technology practice, Inovant LLC. Thompson recently shared some of his best practices with eWEEK Labs. Teamwork. Two years ago, Visa determined that completed projects would be more efficient and more […]

When holiday shopping hits the frenzy level, Visa International will be well-prepared to handle an expected peak load of 100 million transactions per day—as many as 6,200 per second—thanks to its largest system upgrade ever. The rollout of the upgrade last month included an unprecedented number of enhancements and applications to Visas payment processing system. […]

Users who want to get their news feeds from the same place they browse the Internet should take a look at Pluck, a newsreader from a company by the same name. The free newsreader integrates with Microsofts Internet Explorer and allows users to read news feeds from within the browser. Microsoft Outlook users will find […]

When it comes to looking for e-mail and files using Microsofts search functions, Ive always found the process sluggish and ineffective. Google Desktop Search, a free download released last month, aims to make life easier by extending the companys excellent Web searching to the desktop—and it does, as long as youre a user of Microsoft […]

When youre leading in the American Le Mans Series GT division, the difference between staying ahead of the pack and losing to your closest competitor can be a matter of seconds. This is why the emerging technology used by the Alex Job Racing team is not limited to carbon-fiber Porsche GT (Gran Turismo) race cars. […]

Faced with a rapid proliferation of Windows servers as a result of business growth, Moen Inc. tapped virtualization software from VMware Inc. to control server sprawl within its data centers. The move enabled the largest faucet maker in North America to cut operations expenses by 25 percent within six months and decreased the companys total […]