Every company uses networked-shared storage, whether it's implemented as a ring of trusty old file servers or as a speedy, expensive SAN (storage area network). As workloads increase -- both the frequency of transactions and the quantity of data to move and store -- IT managers are learning that their older storage systems have trouble keeping up.
The modern enterprise is an amalgam of solutions forged by necessity, and the demands of meeting a company's day-to-day requirements often obscure priorities. When it comes to storage, users' only concerns are getting more than what they have and making that faster. It falls to IT managers to balance these immediate needs against their larger goals, which garner attention only in times of crisis: keeping costs down, increasing manageability, and improving recoverability. Obtaining funding and manpower to meet the last of these objectives was a tough sell until last September.
Recent interest in Web services has refocused IT's attention on EAI (enterprise application integration) middleware. In integration projects, no software component is more important than messaging. Every new project poses challenging architectural questions -- such as the use of XML and the selection of programming languages -- but all successful integration work hinges on a robust and flexible messaging infrastructure.
Microsoft recently began shipping the retail edition of its new top-end development product, Visual Studio .Net Enterprise Architect. This massive bundle unites the Visual Studio .Net IDE (integrated development environment) with Visio-based modeling tools, the full suite of .Net enterprise servers, Visual SourceSafe source code control, and facilities for creating architectural templates for team development. Following on the heels of countless public previews and betas, the release version of the Visual Studio IDE itself held few surprises for us.
Microsoft recently began shipping the retail edition of its new top-end development product, Visual Studio .Net Enterprise Architect. This massive bundle unites the Visual Studio .Net IDE (integrated development environment) with Visio-based modeling tools, the full suite of .Net enterprise servers, Visual SourceSafe source code control, and facilities for creating architectural templates for team development. Following on the heels of countless public previews and betas, the release version of the Visual Studio IDE itself held few surprises for us.
All the companies that use the Web for business have content problems. Some Web pages are posted for public viewing before they are formally approved. Urgent updates can sit in someone's inbox for days, waiting to be turned into HTML code and posted. Other content remains unchanged on the site for so long that it becomes irrelevant. What's needed is a system that empowers everyone in the company to contribute content to the Web site while maintaining strict controls over where it's posted and how long it stays visible.
Every company that does business on the Internet, regardless of the server or software chosen for the job, has experienced site performance crises. These woes can degenerate to site failure -- or even worse, to the loss or corruption of data. If you lack a sensible strategy for addressing Web site performance problems, you have little hope of diagnosing them and meting out the appropriate cure before users are seriously affected.
With the exception of key partners, no one outside of Microsoft Corp. had seen anything new on the .NET front for nine months. A lot of anxious developers were sick of hearing, "It'll be in beta 2," when they inquired about bug fixes and enhancements. Finally, last month at the TechEd conference, Microsoft distributed the second beta release of its .NET software to attendees and made it available to thousands of Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) subscribers as a 1.3GB download, most of which is sample code and documentation.
Internet Information Services (IIS), the Web server included with every Windows server OS, is a cornerstone of Microsoft's distributed applications strategy. IIS 5.0 is widely thought to be the best part of Windows 2000 Server, yet its limitations have moved designers to consider alternatives. The newest release, IIS 6.0, a surprise addition to Windows 2002 Server Beta 2, boasts improvements across the board.
By any measure, Sun Microsystems Inc. is at the top of its game. Yet as all-encompassing as Sun's empire has become through development and acquisitions, its most successful ventures revolve around a common element: the Solaris operating system.
With billions spent on hardware, software, and services each year, the enterprise Unix market can support more than one major player.
Like everyone else who's used an online search engine, you're well acquainted with the sorry state of content retrieval. It doesn't seem to matter how carefully you craft your query - some results will be wholly unrelated to your topic. The inaccuracy of content retrieval is merely frustrating to casual users, but it costs professionals real money.
In any complex exchange between a human and a computer, chunks of time and data are inevitably lost in the translation process.
Microsoft .NET, the software giant's language-independent architecture for enterprise applications, is a decisive departure from current Windows programming methods. Even the most intrepid developers have taken to the command-line tools supplied with the .NET software development kit (SDK), doing well enough with those tools to ask Microsoft to permit production use of .NET software.
Microsoft .NET, the software giant's language-independent architecture for enterprise applications, is a decisive departure from current Windows programming methods. Even the most intrepid developers have taken to the command-line tools supplied with the .NET SDK (software development kit), doing well enough with those tools to ask Microsoft Corp. to permit production use of .NET software. But to tackle large commercial projects, most developers need the help of a graphical IDE (integrated development environment) such as Visual Studio.NET.