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As the business use of mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones proliferates, IT departments are scrambling to implement adequate security safeguards both inside and outside company walls The cost of implementing security measures is problematic for many small-to-medium-sized enterprises, but the alternative can be worse....

A lot happened at Insights, the Sage partner meeting held in Nashville earlier this month, though not necessarily at the press release level. I was there and got a sense of change happening. It was the first anniversary of new CEO Sue Swenson coming on board and our first opportunity to see the imprint she is making on the company. Last year, Swenson had been with the company for only a matter of weeks and as CEO could only talk about the future. With a year behind her some results are apparent, but the expectation is that there is a lot of work ahead. ...

There are clearly more reasons these days than ever before for companies to adopt free and open source software Adopting it they are, too -- in droves, it seems. How else could vendor Red Hat, for example, surpass all expectations with its most recent earnings report?...

Early adopters of Microsoft's next operating system won't facedebilitating bi-hourly shutdowns or be forced to clean-install therelease candidate until July 1, despite an email that went out overthe holiday weekend setting a June 1 deadline The date for the shutdowns to begin isactually July 1, a month before the Windows 7 beta program expires, acc...

Palm will unveil its long-awaited Pre smartphone June 6, and Apple's next-generation iPhone is expected to hit the market shortly thereafter. So where are the smartphones based on Google's Android platform, which is considered a potentially serious threat to the iPhone? Rumors have it that AT&T will unveil an Android smartphone from HTC in August; ...

There are more signs that the unveiling of Microsoft's revamped Live Search -- codenamed "Kumo" during its development phase -- is at hand. It's been widely speculated that Steve Ballmer will introduce it this week at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference Rumors about the launch have been filtering into the public domain. The ...

When he tried to log on to Nokia's new Ovi app store Tuesday, ABI Research senior analyst Jeff Orr found a lot of blank screens "They either got off to a wild success because everybody's trying it, or more likely, there are some bugs along the way," Orr said....

Earlier this year, HP rolled out a new offering to help companies manage the operations and applications they're putting in the cloud. Called "HP Cloud Assure," it's a -- what else? -- a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool that monitors security and performance. The number of management tools developed for the cloud environment is growing, and HP's ...

RFID has been on a bit of a roller coaster ride. It started with a bang a few years ago, when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense issued their edicts that all suppliers would need to get on the RFID bandwagon within a set time frame. Well, that deadline has come and gone, and uptake has fallen well short of the mark. While the expectation was t...

Does testing require a plan? That may sound like a silly question, but many organizations leave the testing to the end of the project, and whatever time is left is the time that will be spent on testing. That philosophy brings up many questions: What is the purpose of the test plan? What is to be accomplished with the testing? How are resources...

This story was originally published on Jan. 30, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. It may be as sexy as grandma's underpants, but data is the foundation upon which everything else is layered. Without the right support underneath, the fat will roll over your margins, creating an unsightly, unseemly, unprofitab...

We all remember Sarah Palin. Like many, I too got excited about the difference she would bring to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. She showed well at events, and she looked good on paper. Then came her interviews, and suddenly she was the new Dan Quayle -- or, basically, another person who trades on looks and luck and doesn't figure doing homework is actually necessary. ...

Depending on which technology blog you read, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is either engaging in pre-Palm Pre marketing hype or covering up some major smartphone production problems. Hesse told an industry conference audience earlier this week that he expected shortages "for a while" when the Pre launches at retail June 6, according to a Dow Jones report.

Google on Thursday revealed Chrome 2.0, a purportedly faster and more feature-filled version of the search giant's Web browser. The extra speed comes from an update to its V8 JavaScript engine and from a new version of the open source WebKit rendering engine.

Microsoft has withdrawn its request for an oral hearing over the latest antitrust charges levied against it by the European Commission. An oral hearing in the case is voluntary, and whether one is held should, theoretically, not impact its outcome. However, the EC's apparent inflexibility in accommodating Microsoft's request for a date change does not bode well for the company.

After weeks of striking a conciliatory and cooperative tone, Craigslist is going on the offensive in the controversy over its erotic services section Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster filed a complaint in a federal court in South Carolina, seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order against the state's attorney general, Henry McMaster, who has t...

Mozilla's call to developers to participate in its Jetpack project on Wednesday is the latest onslaught in the ongoing war of the Web browsers. Jetpack is an open source application programming interface (API) that will let users create add-ons for Mozilla's Firefox browser using the Web technologies they already know....

Maybe it's another example of great minds thinking alike -- or in my case, a not-so-great mind kinda-sorta thinking along the same lines as Edward Wasserman, journalism professor at Washington and Lee University and nationally syndicated media columnist. I had every intention of using this week's column to discuss the forced migration of out-of-wo...

After a couple of weeks of discussion and speculation in the media-obsessed blogosphere, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has finally gone on the record and admitted that his company has considered buying a newspaper but decided against the idea In a wide-ranging Thursday interview with the online Financial Times, Schmidt gave no specifics about potential a...

In about two weeks, Microsoft is expected to launch Kumo, its sort of old, sort of new search engine. Microsoft regards Kumo as its Google killer, according to analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, and the software company is banking heavily on it despite deep internal divisions over the project.