Michael Hickins

With Microsoft  building hype as it hurtles toward its much-ballyhooed Vista launch, the software vendor today released Office Live, one of the key applications expected to leverage the advanced features in the forthcoming Windows operating system. Office Live, which offers a variety of hosted applications aimed principally at small- and medium-sized businesses, comes in three […]

What comes after Second Life? After IBM  CEO Sam Palmisano took to the popular virtual world Second Life to announce a $100 million spending plan on virtual worlds for real-world business problems, what’s comes next? Plenty, IBM officials told internetnews.com. IBM is funding development of simplified business engines to help small businesses tap into Web […]

IBM  CEO Sam Palmisano will announce a $100 million spending plan tomorrow in front of more than 7,000 employees. And neither he nor they will be there in the flesh. But they’ll be there virtually, at a Town Hall meeting held on popular virtual world Second Life. There, Palmisano (or his avatar) will unveil 10 […]

NetManage has unveiled an application that helps companies measure and allocate resources as they introduce SOA  into their IT environments. SOA allows enterprises to extend legacy applications rather than having to replace them with more modern software, but it also tends to be more inefficient from a resource perspective, requiring more bandwidth and CPU utilization. […]

Motorola  today agreed to acquire privately-held Good Technology for an undisclosed sum to bolster its suite of mobile applications for enterprise users. Motorola and Good are hardly strangers to one another. Good Technology, which provides mobile computing software and service for the enterprise market, already provides the software enabling the mobile e-mail features of Motorola’s […]

Enterprise search vendor Autonomy is offering customers a new twist on spidering that it says will increase search relevancy within the enterprise. The Cambridge, England-based company said the enhancement to its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) application allows users to receive real-time results from highly fungible sources of data, including business applications and the Web. […]

This is not for the change-averse or faint of heart. Former PeopleSoft co-founder and CEO Dave Duffield this week opened Workday, a company offering Web-based enterprise resource planning (ERP)  software for mid-sized companies. The software, which features a browser-based interface and a Web services-based approach to interoperability, is intended to mirror actual workflows and help […]

No need to shake the box. It’s another tie. Microsoft  has unwrapped a sleigh-full of presents for its partners and customers, including enhanced developer tools and new software integrations. The software tools are intended to help developers write new applications for Vista and the 2007 Office suite. At its Visual Studio Connections conference in Las […]

Reporter’s Notebook: The only thing older than ballot stuffing is democracy itself. That’s why the current brouhaha over electronic voting machines has a lot of observers scratching their heads. Moreover, direct recording electronic voting machines (DREs) offer voters a lot of benefits. For one thing, they make it possible for people with disabilities to vote […]

Microsoft Office 2007 has gone golden. The Redmond, Wash.-based software vendor  released its latest version of the world-beating desktop productivity suite to manufacturing today. “We’ve crossed the development finish line,” noted Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division in a statement. Raikes added that the new release includes the most significant improvements to the […]

Surfer beware? McAfee  today unveiled software to help consumers avoid stumbling onto sites that spam them, place adware on their computers or try to extract financial data by pretending to be their bank. When SiteAdvisor customers click on a link to a site that McAfee thinks is malicious, the tool redirects them to a buffer […]

Electronic voting machines have come under heavy attack in the days leading up to next week’s election, leaving voters with the uneasy feeling that the will of the people will not be respected. Deforest Soaries, the former chairman of the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), says voters should be concerned. According to Soaries, the guidelines published […]