Stories by: P.J. Connolly

Perhaps my favourite manipulated image of the past year was the alleged image of a G5-powered Apple’s Xserve with a case designed by Sub-Zero Freezer. It pretty much summed up the biggest challenge of cramming the latest generation of the PowerPC family into a 1U server box: cooling.

Networking is the plumbing of information technology. Like conventional plumbing, most people take it for granted until a pipe bursts or a faucet starts dripping. But unlike the pipes in houses and offices, networking technology is evolving at a frantic pace, even as IT investments have slowed to a trickle in the past few years.

Remember when it seemed possible that paper would go the way of typewriter ribbons in the workplace? That vision never quite materialised — people remain wedded to hard copy. Even so, documents are almost always created on computers, whether through a manual editing process or by way of an application running with little or no human intervention. Documents are the lifeblood of the enterprise. So maintaining their look and feel regardless of the platforms on which they are created or viewed is vital.

One of the primary drawbacks of the Windows platform is the amount of time it takes to keep up with patches for the operating system and the inextricably entwined Internet Explorer Web browser. New patches are issued so frequently that they could be dubbed “the patch of the week”.

Microsoft is poised to release the long-anticipated — and frequently renamed — Windows Server 2003, almost a year and a half after the last beta version became available in November 2001. Our experiences with what we are assured is the gold code confirmed that this is indeed the best version of Windows to come out of the gate. Improved performance, better management tools, and a rapidly maturing directory service give customers something to look forward to when they take the plunge.

Spit and dirty socks, I said, upon learning of Microsoft’s new plan to reduce the number of critical security patches for Windows and other software. I then opined that Windows .Net Server 2003 would require 30 such patches in the first year after its release, which is expected sometime after April 2003.

When Microsoft Office 11 ships in 2003, it will mark the fifth release in eight years of the industry leader in desktop application suites. Even Bill Ford doesn’t expect you to buy a new car every other year. But it’s no wonder that upgrade fatigue is a concern of CTOs and IT managers, given the additional expenses involved in retraining users and refitting desktops with new software.

When we reviewed Mac OS X Server last year, we noted that Apple had a credibility problem. The company lacked a decent hardware platform on which to run a promising operating system. At the time, the best an IT manager could do was stack some of Apple's higher-end desktops and tie them to a rack with third-party fasteners; not exactly a pretty solution.

The promise of simplicity is one reason why wireless LANs are all the rage. No messy cables, just install an access point and some 802.11b (or Wi-Fi, as some prefer) cards, and unless you care about little details like security, you're good to go, right?

It's been said that server blades represent a strange and unusual challenge for IT departments because they somehow require a complete rethinking of management and support processes.

Many collaboration tools fall short of expectations because they really don't take into account the way people work. For most distributed organisations, e-mail becomes the de facto tool of choice because of its simplicity and ubiquity.