Timothy Dyck

The release of Windows Server 2003 is a small step forward for the platform—an effort that really should be considered Windows 2000 Server Second Edition. With the exception of Internet Information Services 6.0, there arent any far-reaching or fundamental changes in the product. Organizations that like how Windows 2000 Server is working for them will […]

For most office workers, staying on top of things means keeping track of a depressingly large amount of paper—paper that, no matter how hard we try, seems to keep piling up in desk corners and file folders. Paper is durable, portable and cheap, but its very hard to manipulate as a data format. ScanSoft Inc.s […]

March was a bleak month for security and no doubt left many administrators figuratively tapping out Save Our Server signals on their wirelesses. Advisories came out last month for root-level vulnerabilities on three major server applications: Sendmails namesake product, Microsofts Internet Information Services 5.0 Web server and the Samba Development Teams Samba file server. Together, […]

Teros this week shipped a free Social Security number protection add-on to its $25,000 Teros-100 Application Protection System Web application security appliance. To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has tried to automatically filter SSN traffic in real time. Teros has similar add-ons to help prevent credit card and password disclosure. The SafeIdentity […]

In contrast to other Web scripting languages, JSP presents the greatest training hurdle for Web designers wanting to design applications because of Javas mandatory data typing and exacting syntax. M7 Corp.s M7 Application Assembly Platform 3.0 (which eWEEK Labs reviewed in final beta form) provides a spoonful of sugar to help the Java go down. […]

The category of e-business foundations includes the building blocks most organizations use as part of their basic IT application infrastructure: application servers and Web services tools, databases, server operating systems, data management packages, electronic storefronts, and data integration servers. This years field of entrants included a good mix of products spread across these application types, […]

Adoption of SOAP 1.1 has been so fast and so broad that the World Wide Web Consortium standard can almost be viewed as a synonym for Web services. After two and a half years of development work, the follow-on version of Simple Object Access Protocol, 1.2, is almost complete. SOAP 1.2 thoroughly scrubs SOAP 1.1, […]

On March 14, a 20-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin was charged by federal authorities in connection with an attack at the university, where the Social Security numbers and other personal information of approximately 55,200 people were illegally retrieved. The attack highlights some subtle issues that all security administrators should be considering. […]

A new package from Sanctum, released in March, will help active server pages .Net development teams catch security problems during the development process. AppScan Developer Edition 1.5—a new product despite the version number—is a customized version of the AppScan Web application security scanner I last reviewed in the middle of last year. Its been redesigned […]

As Web services become bigger pieces of an organizations technology infrastructure, the same kind of discipline that keeps core database servers and directory servers running at a reliability of four or five nines needs to be applied to Web services servers. If it cant be, then the technology cant be depended upon to deliver all […]

Web services technology has become the universal glue for keeping the pieces of large distributed systems together. Theres been tremendous progress on this front, and two cutting-edge tools from Systinet Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. push SOAP 1.1 just about as far as it can go. Systinets WASP (Web Applications and Services Platform) Server for […]

Microsoft Corp.s InfoPath beta provides a tool natively designed to provide a forms front end for XML data. As my colleague Jason Brooks notes, the tool is a Windows client application that requires a commitment to the latest Microsoft technologies. The usefulness of an XML forms client in an XML-centric environment is undeniable, but theres […]