P. J. Connolly

When faced with an unfamiliar Web conferencing platform, even the most experienced PowerPoint ranger can be baffled by the seemingly limitless options and capabilities of the most advanced conferencing platforms. But with complexity comes cost, and there’s room in the market for a powerful, yet low-cost alternative to brand-name services such as Citrix’s GoToMeeting and […]

Ordinarily, business cares as much for civil liberties as my dog does for integral calculus; in most cases, personal freedoms are as relevant to making a buck as the slope of a curve is to what kind of pizza is coming up the steps. But there’s a hole in privacy law that affects corporate America […]

A few years ago, mashups were the bee’s knees of enterprise development, and when you look at what traditional business applications did and how they were built, the idea made perfect sense. The mashup concept was supposed to allow organizations to build on the last decade’s investment in service-oriented architectures, combine SOA-driven workflows with federated […]

It wasn’t that long ago that Apple courted the enterprise IT dollar with rack-mounted servers, solid and reliable RAID arrays, grid computing and storage networking. Today, that’s just a memory. Although Apple continues to maintain and support server software, such as Xgrid and Xsan, the hardware is history. But after the first-day sellout of this […]

I have met what seems like a few hundred field techs over the years I’ve spent in IT, and the one thing they all have in common is a desire for lighter, more portable diagnostic tools. Mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad offer the potential to be an excellent platform for such use, […]

Anyone who’s ever been in a bar band will confirm that it’s usually better to be the second act, unless the opener turns out to be wildly popular with the first arrivals in the audience. That seems to hold true with mobile devices as well: if the early adopters create the right buzz, the second […]

Just because a business is small in headcount doesn’t mean that its needs don’t require enterprise-quality software. In many ways, a small business needs a reliable and easily supported platform for core business services far more than a sprawling multinational. At the very least, the need exists for something that’s both powerful and simple. Windows […]

LibreOffice 3.3 is as polished as one might expect in a project that, for all of its novelty, has many years of development work backing it up. Any outfit that’s looking for a solid toolset for users who don’t require a lot of handholding, or integration with Microsoft’s Office server applications, could do much worse […]

It’s been a little more than 20 years since I designed my first from-scratch cable plant, but one basic fact hasn’t changed, no matter how much the physical media and the wire protocols have evolved. That eternal truth is really quite simple: The boss and the users don’t care about the network until it ceases […]

Meh. No, really. That’s the tl;dr version of my first take on the announcement of what would actually be in the iPad 2, and it’s my own fault. I read too many rumors in the months leading up to the March 2 event, and I’m now in a mental state that’s closer to a post-holiday […]

One of the more surprising results of the mobile revolution is the way that IT departments have lost their role as the providers of the technology. It’s now just as likely that people will be doing business with personally owned devices, as they are to use devices issued by their employers. As recently as five […]

Thunderbolt and performance improvements make this more than just “this year’s model.” Read my full review at eweek.com.