Jim Rapoza

When youre the best, it can be tough to stay on top. With the release last month of XMLSpy 2004, Altova Inc. has not significantly upgraded its Analysts Choice award-winning XML and Web services editing tool, although the new features and integration in this version are welcome. While XMLSpy 2004 isnt a significant upgrade over […]

When you look at Microsoft Office, its hard not to feel a little sorry for it. After all, probably no other Microsoft product has been as thoroughly thrashed by its competitors as Office has. Im not talking about Suns StarOffice and its OpenOffice sibling, though both are excellent suites and certainly give Office 2003 a […]

Imagine youre at the store to buy a box of cereal, but none of the cereal boxes has a price listed. You ask a clerk the price; he tells you that it depends on how big your family is or if you plan on eating the cereal all at once or over several breakfasts or […]

If you are competent at creating Microsofts PowerPoint presentations, Impact Pointless is probably one of the most aptly named products available. However, if you are truly bad at creating presentations and constantly indulge in the worst impulses—such as adding many large uncompressed images and dropping Microsofts Excel graphs as embedded objects rather than images—Impact Pointless […]

When a major worm or virus strikes, a wave of anxiety sweeps over most of us. But there are some who, I imagine, become quite happy, who smile, rub their hands together and, like Mr. Burns of “The Simpsons,” exclaim, “Excellent!” I am thinking about some anti-virus and security vendors because, after all, who doesnt […]

The story of the little guy beating the big guy has long been a favorite, dating from David and Goliath. But what if David, instead of using a sling and stone to bring down Goliath, used a nuclear weapon to kill not only Goliath but also Davids allies, as well as the innocent bystanders? And […]

When a complex, costly enterprise survey application isnt a high priority for deployment, a hosted online survey application is a good choice for departmental use. Version 4.1 of WebSurveyors namesake service is an option worth consideration. WebSurveyor 4.1 includes new capabilities—including support for multipage questions, weighting of questions and multilanguage support—that put it on par […]

IBMs WebSphere Commerce 5.5 provides enterprises with an extremely powerful and flexible platform for handling online business, from business-to-consumer to business-to-business to hosted services. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY WebSphere Commerce 5.5 IBMs powerful e-commerce application gives enterprises all the capabilities they will need in a single platform and does so without sacrificing quality. However, companies interested in […]

Traditionally, digital rights management controls on documents have been embedded in the documents themselves, making them very portable but also making it difficult to change these rights. Using server- and client-based DRM capabilities, Authentica Inc.s PageRecall 3.1 makes it possible to apply detailed access rights to documents and to change or revoke them at any […]

Digital rights management and copyright protection systems have been getting a lot of press lately, but usually more for what they promise than for what they actually do. DRM is a technology that has yet to prove its worth, either in the area of intellectual property protection—its traditional domain—or in the corporate arena, where vendors […]

So youre a software vendor and youd like to increase your user base and spark interest in your products? My advice: Give your stuff away. No, Im not talking about converting to open source. And I dont mean that you should give your newest releases away. But you should take all your old products that […]

One of the main technologies web sites use to improve performance and limit the load on servers is caching, especially caching appliances, which store site content and deliver it to visitors directly, rather than pulling it from the server. However, these appliances were traditionally limited to static content. With dynamic Web content, static caching doesnt […]