With the announcement of Office 14 for the Web at its recent Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft has fired a salvo across the bows of Adobe, Google, Zoho, and other desktop-apps wannabes, as it plans to offer users familiar tools that will allow them to create, edit, and collaborate online.
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/11/2008 - Richard Edwards
The Eclipse-based IBM Lotus Notes and Domino v8 suite extends the familiar Notes solution set to an integrated collaboration platform, incorporating access to document creation, document management, project management, and custom composite applications. Composite applications can be developed by combining Eclipse and Notes applications as components; templates can be developed for business managers to drive business process; and the provisioning and management of the offering is all server-based. IBM has…
Technology Audits - published 05/11/2008 - Chandranshu Singh, Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
Organisations, and the IT industry in general, are moving slowly but surely towards a services-oriented, network-centric model of computing, and as a result the venerable Windows-based desktop computer – together with its applications – is starting to be seen as something of a legacy system.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/10/2008 - Richard Edwards
The term ‘Web 2.0’ has been with us for some considerable time if one thinks about it in terms of ‘Internet years’, and so with some inevitability the phrase ‘Web 3.0’ is starting to be discussed by futurologists and industry observers.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/10/2008 - Richard Edwards
Like an increasing number of companies today, Sun Microsystems is looking at virtual workplaces. With over half of the company’s workforce working remotely at any given time, the opportunities for impromptu meetings and chance encounters were diminishing, and so the company decided to build a virtual extension to its Menlo Park campus.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 15/10/2008 - Richard Edwards
The term ‘Enterprise 2.0’ has become something of a catch-all phrase that describes the wholesale shift in enterprise IT thinking. Driven by changing business needs and social factors, organisations are starting to do things differently. Speed, agility, mobility, reuse, and innovation are the transformative drivers that are forcing organisations to push aside old technologies, models, and architectures to make way for the new Web 2.0 world of service-oriented, highly-virtualised, truly-commoditised, and …
Technology Management and Strategy Reports - published 18/09/2008 - Alan Rodger, Andy Kellett, Mark Blowers, Michael Azoff, Mike Davis, Mike Thompson, Richard Edwards, Rob Hailstone, Sarah Burnett, Tim Jennings
Last month I came back from a business trip to the US to find that, unbeknown to me, my all-singing, all-dancing Nokia 95 had run-up a UK£60 data roaming charge with my mobile operator. As I could not account for this data usage, and as this was my personal mobile phone, I decided to investigate further…
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/09/2008 - Richard Edwards
The term ‘Enterprise 2.0’ has become something of a catch-all phrase that describes the wholesale shift in enterprise IT thinking. Driven by changing business needs and social factors, organisations are starting to do things differently.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 03/09/2008 - Richard Edwards
The IT Service Management (ITSM) Blueprint is a service suite comprising an assessment of the ITSM maturity, a set of ITIL-based processes, detailed tool configurations, workshop-based training, and post implementation monitoring. The service set is aimed at developing the business case, securing buy-in, and closely linking best practice methodology-based processes with solution configuration. A lot of organisations struggle with ITIL adoption because of challenges associated with establishing and commun…
Technology Audits - published 01/09/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
Business Community Management (BCM) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) offering from Inovis, aimed at reducing the complexity of managing the supply chain. It is comprised of individually licensable components that can be delivered as traditional on-premises software, through Software as a Service (SaaS), or as a managed service through Inovisworks. Inovis BCM provides a secure communications layer to transport standardised electronic documents either as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or in multiple othe…
Technology Audits - published 18/08/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
I’m a big fan of PDAs, laptops, and smartphones, but like most of you reading this article, I tend to use good old-fashioned pen and paper when taking notes in meetings. I’ve tried to adapt my meeting style to better suit digital devices, even trying out a tablet PC for a while, but I keep returning to pen and paper because of its form factor and convenience... until now!
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/08/2008 - Richard Edwards
The term ‘Enterprise 2.0’ has become the catch-all phrase that describes the wholesale shift in enterprise IT thinking. Driven by changing business needs and social factors, organisations are starting to do things differently. Speed, agility, mobility, reuse, and innovation are the transformative drivers that are forcing organisations to push aside old technologies, models, and architectures to make way for the new Web 2.0 world of service oriented, highly virtualised, truly commoditised, and eventually …
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/08/2008 - Richard Edwards
blueKiwi provides a social networking solution aimed at promoting informal communication and collaboration within large enterprises. The communication is structured around Communities, which are in effect public forums, and Workshops, which are private collaboration sites. The blueKiwi enterprise social software platform provides a range of features, such as blogs, RSS feeds, and Wikis. Content publishing and tagging are key facets of this offering, both of which combine to build a rich set of metadata o…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
planningIT is an enterprise architecture management solution aimed at optimising IT investments and improving the alignment of IT to business strategy while supporting and maturing IT planning capabilities. It does this by providing integrated business demand management, solution assessment, and project portfolio optimisation modules based on a logical IT inventory that also supports technology standardisation, architecture patterning, migration, and release management. The solution captures data related…
Technology Audits - published 11/07/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
In his new book (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google), Nicholas Carr examines the technological transformation that is currently underway as software applications that were once stored on the PC move to the Web, or to the ‘cloud’ as some now call it. For many, the title of Carr’s book will trigger thoughts of a time for turning, shifting, and changing; but if one were to follow Carr’s electrical utility analogy presented in his book to its ultimate conclusion, then perhaps we should…
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/06/2008 - Richard Edwards
Last month, in the first part of my ‘Coping with SharePoint’ article, I wrote about the rising popularity of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, and also how this free offering from Microsoft differs from its portal product – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 25/06/2008 - Richard Edwards
GFT inboxx is a high-performance solution for e-mail archiving that addresses regulatory compliance, e-discovery for litigation support, and the reduction of the administrative overheads and storage requirements. The rapid increase in the volume of e-mails, regulations that directly or indirectly mandate e-mail archiving, and the importance of quickly retrieving the right e-mail in the event of litigation, are factors driving the need for e-mail archiving. inboxx stands out with easy deployment, policy-b…
Technology Audits - published 16/06/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
Cranberry is a UK company that specialises in software and hardware solutions for the server-based computing market, and so it knows all too well the frustrations and ‘gotchas’ that hinder desktop and application virtualisation projects. Spurred on by the fact that organisations are still looking for a device that bridges the gap between the thin client and the traditional desktop PC, Cranberry has decided to build its own device: the Cranberry SC20 Smart Client.
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/06/2008 - Richard Edwards
MetaSight is a social networking solution that through automated and unobtrusive indexing of e-mail metadata enables analysis of an individual’s personal communication patterns, of networks around content areas, and of patterns of communication with external entities. Using these capabilities, organisations can more easily search for people with specific capabilities, relationships, and interests. In addition to the obvious benefits of locating an ‘expert’ quickly, Butler Group believes that MetaSight co…
Technology Audits - published 10/06/2008 - Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
Many of us now spend more time working on e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations than we do anything else, and as a result the number of digital assets that have to be stored, managed, and protected each year is going up and up.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 04/06/2008 - Richard Edwards
Delegates attending last week’s Butler Group Information Management and Collaboration Symposium got a personal tour of ‘Project Wonderland’ – Sun Microsystems’ Java-based, virtual workplace. After the presentation I asked the audience if they would be willing to pay UK£9.99 per-user, per-month for this kind of facility, and around 75% of them said they would.
OpinionWire Articles - published 22/05/2008 - Richard Edwards
Organisations are no longer contained within a single building, city, country, or even continent, and so Wide Area Networks (WANs) are an essential component of every enterprise landscape, either for point-to-point communication between systems on different sites, or for client communications to centralised servers and services.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Richard Edwards
According to reports from the SANS Institute, up to 30% of the storage required in an organisation is used for log file data retention – an outrageous amount by any measure. However, despite the obvious wealth of information contained within these files, it would appear that very few organisations have the time to analyse them, and until recently, relatively few IT managers considered them as essential to corporate wellbeing.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Richard Edwards
With the introduction of Google App Engine, the company is joining the likes of Amazon and others with its cloud-based application creation and instantiation services. But as Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, highlighted in a recent blog posting, we are seeing the emergence of various layers of Web services operating at different levels of abstraction, serving different market needs.
OpinionWire Articles - published 17/04/2008 - Richard Edwards
Following on from the company’s high-level announcements in January, IBM this week enlarged upon its mashup strategy by announcing IBM Mashup Center – a combination of Lotus Mashups and InfoSphere MashupHub.
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/04/2008 - Richard Edwards
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