Jim Rapoza

Content management and portal vendors dont need to add Web services capabilities to their wares; these capabilities have always been there, even if they havent been called Web services by name. After all, portals are essentially centralized Web interfaces made up of many different services pulling data from multiple internal and external sources. And portals […]

In many ways, it seems that if a product exists, Microsoft also has to offer one. This has led to strange products, especially in the companys hardware line. To be fair, Microsofts hardware products have generally been as good as anything else—and in some cases, such as its excellent game controllers, among the best. But […]

Right now is not a good time to try and run a secure commerce Web site, at least if youre a Web administrator who forgets to patch systems. On the heels of the late-summer discovery of security holes in both Apache and Microsofts Commerce Server, a new worm is cleverly exploiting a month-and-half-old security hole […]

As the famous developer said while on his deathbed, “XML is easy, XML Schema is hard”. OK, so maybe it really was a famous actor speaking about acting and comedy. The point is still the same. One of the reasons for the heavy adoption of XML is how easy it is to learn. XML is […]

Macromedia Inc.s Flash Communication Server MX brings powerful, flexible collaboration capabilities to the popular format for media-rich Web applications, making it attractive to businesses that have had a hard time finding a collaboration platform for their needs. eWeek Labs used Flash Communication Server MX, in conjunction with the Flash MX development environment, to build a […]

With the release of Netscape 7.0, Netscape Communications Corp. and its parent, America Online Inc., have finally completed the transformation of the browser from a powerful and highly customizable Web and e-mail client to an intrusive home-user-focused client more on par with Microsoft Corp.s MSN Explorer and the AOL client itself. The fact that Netscape […]

Synchronizing files between systems or network folders is something all of us must do, but syncing today has changed little from its early days. Fortunately, a small company called Peer Software has found a way to do the job better. Using Peer Softwares Save-N-Sync 2.0, I was able to sync multiple folders, do bidirectional syncing […]

With the release of Netscape 7.0, Netscape Communications Corp. and its parent AOL have finally completed the transformation of the browser from a powerful and highly customizable Web and e-mail client to an intrusive home-user-focused client more on par with Microsoft Corp,s MSN Explorer and the AOL client itself. The fact that Netscape 7.0 arrives […]

Remember when Web analytics went out of style? “Clickstream” was the term of the day, and analysts expounded on the coming time when simple Web site analysis would be replaced by massive systems that would combine business intelligence and personalization to integrate all a companys data, be it brick-and- mortar or online. That was at […]

How many hits are we getting? Which are the most popular pages on our site? Where are visitors coming from? These are the most common questions Web site administrators have on a daily basis about their site. But when it comes down to improving the site for visitors, knowing how your site is really used […]

Earlier this week I had a discussion with a colleague about setting up a Windows XP system so that the dial-up connections dialogs would always show the user name when they launched. During the discussion I mentioned that this was considered poor security practice, since at that point an attacker no longer needs to figure […]

For many corporate Web sites, especially departmental intranet sites, regular users with no HTML training need to update and create content. Since a full content management system is often overkill for these types of sites, many businesses turn to WYSIWYG development tools such as Microsoft FrontPage. But these tools need to be deployed to each […]