Cameron Sturdevant

Microsofts System Center Configuration Manager 2007 application and deployment tool, now in Beta 2, gets much of its muscle from new client agents. /zimages/5/28571.gifClick here for eWEEK Labs review of SCCM 2007 Beta 2. One of the most talked-about new agents, Network Access Protection Client, comes with SCCM 2007 by default but wont be usable […]

Bomgars B200 appliance enables remote control of any PC that can make a connection to the Internet. The 1U (1.75-inch) B200 appliance securely handles the connection between a user and a live support representative. B200 is best suited in a call center where the support technician is separated from the user by firewalls and other […]

The newest player on the increasingly crowded NAC field is Trend Micros Network Virus Wall Enforcer 1200, and the product doesnt do much to differentiate itself. That said, the NVWE 1200 is worth consideration at small and midsize businesses that either dont want to wait for Microsofts NAP (Network Admission Protection), slated to be released […]

Back in the foggy past when eWEEK was PC Week, I remember some buzz in the Lab about user authentication based on keystroke cadence. It sounded cool but didn’t seem to take off. On March 28, 2007, I talked with Jared Pfost, a vice president at BioPassword. It turns out that the company that became […]

Thinstall uses virtual application technology to enable IT administrators to run products such as Microsoft Word and Excel on users’ systems without actually installing the software and without making any changes to the local file system or registry. If this sounds similar to Microsoft’s SoftGrid, (based on Microsoft’s acquisition of Softricity, which was completed in […]

ZENworks Configuration Manager, now in beta, is Novell’s “next big thing” for desktop management. I mean Windows desktop management. If your organization wants to take Novell’s advice to rip out all of you Windows XP systems and replace them with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), you’ll still need a separate installation of ZENworks Linux Management. […]

The Altiris Manageability Toolkit 6.0 for Intel vPro Technology should significantly reduce IT management costs in large organizations. Intels vPro technology, enabled by the companys Core 2 Duo processors, allows management software such as Altiris to provide serverlike control over desktop systems. Leveraging vPro, the Altiris Manageability Toolkit 6.0 provides device discovery, hardware and software […]

Microsoft won’t release any patches this month but the malicious software removal tool gains the ability to spot Win32/Alureon You can get more info about Win32/Alureon here. I ran the malicious software removal tool on several machines in the lab and got pretty much what I expected…nothing. That’s because my lab systems sit behind several […]

Splunks namesake Splunk Professional, now at Version 2.2, takes log-file and other time-stamped IT performance and monitoring data and turns it into a searchable body of troubleshooting information. Splunks secret sauce is the ability to look for time stamps in log entries and turn the log information into compressed, indexed metadata that can then be […]

XenSource gets in some licks at VMware, Cisco clarifies virtualization strategy and the dinner table talk turns to power-efficient data centers and server monitoring at an industry get-together. I attended the annual N-Square (Networking/Networking) dinner on Tuesday, March 6, in Palo Alto, run by Internet Research Group (John Katsaros, Peter Christy) and sponsored this year […]