Stan Gibson

Securing the Laptop : Mission Impossible?”> Nearly every week, the report of a stolen laptop hits the news and, with it, a horror story of data loss, identity theft and corporate liability. With a downside that steep, its no wonder that the laptop is the target of corporate IT security campaigns nationwide. Few corporate executives […]

We cant live with e-mail; we cant live without it. Indispensable to most businesses today, e-mail can be a millstone around the necks of office workers and the corporate IT professionals who serve them. Bloated in-boxes conceal rather than expose critical e-mail messages, and vast archives of spam and useless messages clog servers and network […]

In 2006, we voiced opinions in this space on a wide range of issues that we believe are of vital interest to you, our readers, as you use IT and the Internet for strategic business advantage. Heres a summary of where we stand: On the question of net neutrality, we believe the Internet ought to […]

As voice over IP completes its first decade, the technology has become firmly established in corporate voice, data and video communications networks. Now the eyes of the VOIP community are turning to what might be the next big thing on the horizon—fixed-mobile convergence, or the ability of cell phones and VOIP devices to send and […]

ATLANTA—As voice over IP completes its first decade, the technology has become firmly established in corporate voice, data and video communications networks. Now the eyes of the VOIP community are turning to what might be the next big thing on the horizon, FMC (fixed-mobile convergence), or the ability of cell phones and VOIP devices to […]

Trade across international boundaries isnt new. Multinational corporations arent new. Yet, it seems, globalization is new. Although international commerce has been going on since the beginning of civilization, whats different now is instant communication between scattered locations that makes an office on the other side of the world look like it is next door. That […]

Wikis are carving out a niche for themselves in enterprises as the best tool for sharing knowledge to create a common product. So it should come as no surprise that creating textbooks might be an ideal application. Just as Wikipedia collects and presents the combined knowledge of thousands of contributors, so textbooks typically are collaborations […]

When Sun Microsystems announced Nov. 13 that it was releasing all versions of Java (Standard, Enterprise and Micro editions) under GNU GPL Version 2.0, the company did more than put to rest nagging questions about its open-source intentions for Java; it raised open-source software to a new level of significance for large enterprises. Coming just […]

Look in the wiki! If you havent heard that cry already, chances are you will soon, as the use of wikis in enterprise environments spreads like wildfire. Proliferating virally, wiki usage has grown exponentially in recent months, along with other consumer-centric technologies—including blogs, podcasts and RSS—that have made their way into the workplace thanks in […]

Concluding a staged rollout covering two months, IBM has spilled out a grab bag of so-called “service products” encompassing a wide range of skills and technologies, from point-of-sale systems to an IT executive workshop. The bundles of software and expertise sold as distinct packages bring to fruition a significant goal of IBM: to capitalize on […]

Following a time of mass avoidance in the aftermath of the dot-com bust, the U.S. IT work force is facing a shortage of people, according to the Commerce Departments technology czar. “The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough,” said Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology, in […]

Hurricanes dont pick and choose between large and small companies to hit. But, until now, only big companies have had the resources to come up with sophisticated backup schemes. No more. A wave of bigger, cheaper, faster and, above all, easier-to-use network storage products has hit the beach in recent months, leaving the little guys […]