Stories by: Ephraim Schwartz

With the announcement on Tuesday that Microsoft will open its datacenters for hosting of its Dynamics CRM solution, the obvious conclusion might be that Salesforce.com will have a major competitor to contend with.

If one of the underlying tenets of thinking ecologically is to conserve resources, then Miami-Dade County Public Schools is thinking green two times over.

Be careful what you wish for. The iPhone has realized the old promise of the mobile Web. But it's not clear whether the wireless networks can handle the load.

To say that strategy and technology are finally becoming interlinked in business is pure BS.

Convergence took on a new meaning last week when the IEEE 802.3at task force approved the third draft of the PoE (Power over Ethernet) Plus specification, which will converge power lines with Ethernet over an Ethernet cable.

If there's any suspicion that cloud computing is just about building "best of breed" stand-alone application silos on the Web, the recent move by ZoHo may show that cloud computing is finally moving to a more integrated approach.

With the non-decision from the ISO standards body last month on whether or not to adopt Microsoft OOXML (Open Office XML) file format as an industry standard and Microsoft's decision to release the OOXML SDK next month, the discussions over whether or not OOXML is worthy of being a standard is expected to become heated once again.

Microsoft and Nortel continued their partnership in the unified communications space on Tuesday with the announcement of four new joint UC solutions.

Along with the unveiling of prototype handsets using Google's Android mobile application development platform at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, came the promise -- one more time -- of write once, run anywhere.

The uncertain prediction market will get a new player this week when Hubdub introduces a combination news aggregation and predictive platform at the semi-annual Demo conference in California.

The IP wars continue this week with Avaya, now a privately-held rather than public company, announcing Avaya Communications Manager 5.0 and new customer service solutions, including a SIP-enabled handset for CSRs (Customer Service Representatives) Communications Manager 5.0 is a full upgrade rather than a point upgrade to Avaya's main telephony and communications platform. The new version takes the technology from IP to SIP and adds a number of new capabilities.