Features

A funny thing happened on East Carolina University's journey to creating a data-retention strategy. As part of a compliance project launched one and a half years ago, Brent Zimmer, systems specialist at the university, was working with attorneys and archivists to determine which data was most important to keep and for how long. But it soon became clear that it was just as important to identify which data should be thrown away.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appears to be taking a lesson out of the playbook of his buddy, Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Nifty designs, snazzy interfaces, and music and video galore: We give you the skinny on a dozen trend-setting mobile phone models that are slated to debut soon.

Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when traveling to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because US Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth US Circuit Court ruling in April.

A look at this year's job cutbacks at HP, Dell, Sun and other top technology companies

Sights and sounds from the industry's largest virtualization conference.

IC grows up by growing smaller

Buyers of IP PBXs need to look beyond simple voice capabilities to unified communications and make sure the gear they buy will be compatible with applications they will want in the future, experts say.

In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the mechanisms available to IT staffers to activate, deploy and configure iPhones in business environments. But the biggest new business-oriented feature available on the iPhone, thanks to the iPhone 2.x firmware (included with the iPhone 3G and available for free to users of first-generation iPhones or for US$9.95 for iPod Touch users), is the addition of ActiveSync for accessing Microsoft Exchange.

When you're on the road, you can't call upon the resources that officebound employees enjoy. But whether your temporary workspace is a table at Starbucks, a hotel lobby, an airport or a client's lunchroom, you've still got to get the work done.

While no one questions the need to properly scan laptops when going through airport security, the requirement to remove them from their protective cases is a different story. "Naked" notebooks can easily get dropped, damaged, forgotten and even stolen outright. One study done for Dell estimated that about 12,000 laptops are lost in US airports every week -- a claim that has been challenged by the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Whatever the numbers are, you don't want your machine, with all its precious data, to become a statistic.

To avoid getting lost in today's constantly evolving online marketplace, you should be looking to upgrade your e-commerce system within the next six to 12 months.

SOA may have seemed the savior of bad software architecture and poor development project planning, but the reality is that it's a complex and difficult venture. Thus, the number of failed SOA projects is about equal to the successful ones. In other words, you have a 50 percent chance of failing, and the odds of failure are even greater if you work within a larger Global 2000 organization or within the government.

Over the past two years, running Windows and Windows apps virtually on Apple hardware has become a popular way for consumers to dump their PCs in favor of Mac gear.

VMware expects 14,000 attendees at its annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, including workers from more than 200 trade-show exhibitors. That's a 30 percent increase over last year's attendance -- clear evidence of VMware's influence. But VMworld 2008 will also be the focal point for the gathering storm of competition that the virtualization market leader faces.