A colleague recently discussed the problems of collaboration technologies in a column and observed that "Technology is developing faster than our skills to deal with it. We're always on and always connected. But are we always better off? Are we more productive, or simply busier dealing with more messages and more distractions? Share your thoughts with me."
We love tools, whether they are hardware or software. We suspect it is something to do with that Tim Allen guy thing. Anyway, a few tools have landed on our desks with a delightful thud and we decided we needed to share them.
Yep it is true and you aren’t paranoid. At least not in the aliens-are-about-to-abduct-me-is-that-a-black-helicopter-Kennedy-was-assassinated-by-the-Mafia-or-was-it-LBJ kind of way.
WOW. The SCO Group just announced it is dropping the suit against IBM and refunding the money it took in the Linux licence blackmail scheme. And it apologised for being so annoying and said Darl McBride would be driven out of town on a rail after being tarred and feathered.
The other day I received a pitch for an "Internet Wealth and Success" seminar. This was quite a package. A limit of 130 attendees, a staff of 27 (all proclaimed to be Internet marketing gurus although I have never ever heard of any of them ... maybe I don't get out enough), and a price tag of $3,997 per person (but book early to avoid disappointment).
A colleague who we'll call Mr. X ordered a computer from Dell. A few days later he noticed a Dell ad in PC World offering a nearly identical machine for $300 less.
Testing Web services is a tricky task because of the currently limited choice of tools. In an effort to fill the gap the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), an open industry effort set up to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, applications, and programming languages, has released a set of utilities to monitor and analyze Web service data exchanges.
There are three system architectures for handling spam: At the desktop, at the mail server, or outsourced.
As Server Message Block support has been in the news recently, it's a good time to discuss storage appliances that offer this service. The advantage that these devices provide is the ability to add storage to your network painlessly and cost-effectively.
"We are in the process of rebuilding our ethics program and understand that there is still more work to do." - Michael Capellas, Chairman and CEO, MCI
I have received quite a few responses from IT folks about the cost of spam.
Recently, we threatened to discuss Samba, the open source freeware implementation of the Server Message Block protocol. Well, it was no idle threat. Here we go . . .
Wouldn't it be great if we had a way of managing the sequence of business processes that use Web services so that "the flow of tasks, the order in which they need to be performed, the type of data shared and how other partners are involved ... [and] coordinate the various activities that occur within a business process, in order and at the right time for completion"?
Today, I assembled a second typing chair for my office. Not much of a column opening, I grant you, but stick with me, it gets better.
"CRM projects are notoriously complex, often over budget and frequently disappointing. . . . Research firm Gartner (Inc.) says that through 2006, more than 50 percent of all CRM implementations will be viewed as failures from a customer's point of view."