eWEEK EDITORS

Go ahead, cut the cord—wireless network systems have some new tricks up their sleeves that make deploying and managing them simpler than before. But be very sure youre secure. For Greg McGovern, chief technology officer of Adventist Health, deploying a wireless network opened up a Pandoras box. The problem? Its been a victim of its […]

Yet another piece of technology originally expected to surface in Longhorn looks as if it wont make it into the product. The latest element to get the ax is “Monad,” aka MSH (Microsoft Shell), which Microsoft Corp. has touted as its alternative to the scripting shells that Unix and Linux programmers know and love. Microsoft […]

One particular segment of the IT population is driven by exuberance and other irrational motivations to automate everything; and they have reaped a lot of bottom-line victories over the last few years. But their ability to continue to deliver is tapped out. Thats not to say the demented utopia in which all value-added processes are […]

Microsofts Tech Ed conference next week will be a showcase for a raft of new server products from the Redmond software giant that arent quite soup yet. While Microsoft is set to reveal its specific RTM (release-to-manufacturing) target dates for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 at the conference, neither product is ready to […]

This is going to be reader-participation week at CIOInsight.com. Were asking your opinion on a revolutionary, if completely logical idea. The best “pro” and “con” answers will receive a prize (a copy of my new book, “Management by Baseball — A Pocket Reader”). First, some background: The Vesuvian eruption of mail we received about the […]

Microsoft continues to slowly trickle out bits of information about its Office 12 suite. On Thursday the company will announce that it plans to make XML-based file formats the default in the version of Office due to ship in the latter half of 2006. Microsoft is introducing the new formats as part of Office 12, […]

Computer Associates International Inc. recently showered some hard-earned cash on the winners of its Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, the goal of which was to motivate developers to cook up migration toolkits from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase and MySQL databases to CAs Ingres r3 open-source database. The resulting winners are now available and downloadable from […]

In an age of increasingly complicated IT landscapes, with the integration of acquisitions a major issue, Siemens Corp., the U.S. division of Siemens AG, is looking to achieve a higher level of excellence when it comes to business processes. To do this, Vice President and CIO Jan Dressel is in the midst of a multiyear […]

Wal-Mart Executive VP and CIO Linda Dillman says the retailer takes “a development approach” to implementing large-scale IT initiatives. With Wal-Mart being centralized, it has only one IT group for the entire company. Wal-Mart’s IT costs are made part of the company’s general overhead instead of the responsibility of separate business units, Dillman said. “Each […]

McDonald’s is trying to attract younger, tech-savvy customers by offering services, including Internet access, photo printing and ring-tone downloads with the use of an ATM-like device. The device is known as Blaze Net and is in use at a new flagship restaurant in Illinois. “It is clearly unique and not a traditional restaurant,” said Bill […]

Microsoft Corp.s request that developers do more testing of the .Net Framework before the Redmond, Wash., software vendor delivers that technology to market doesnt seem to be fazing the Microsoft development community. The .Net Framework is Microsofts software-platform alternative to Java. It is a collection of technologies, including ASP.Net, the Common Language Runtime and various […]

In my last column I explained the obvious, if mostly ignored, reason why so many significant development projects fail. At its most basic, the problem boils down to the refusal or inability of developers and their managers to adhere to commonplace quality control and documentation procedures that have been proven to result in better products, […]