As businesses grow they carry with them many practices established in their early days. Good practices stand them in good stead as they become larger businesses. This applies to all aspects of running a business, but especially to IT management. Good practice in IT management allows businesses to make effective use of IT while minimizing costs and reducing business risk. ...
01/07/2005 | Achieving_Best_Practice.pdf | VIEW
Previously content with a simple messaging service, business managers and users are increasingly asking questions about the functionality of the email system that supports them. Questions like "How can email be better integrated with our CRM system?" and "How can I best get access to email when out and about?" are being heard more frequently. At the same time, those in "The Business" are becoming even less tolerant of downtime and performance issues. Against this background, this short report considers the reasons behind the evolution of user demand and their relevance to email related investment decisions, particularly the migration to Microsoft Exchange 2003. ...
01/06/2005 | Why does email matter.pdf | VIEW
The downturn that followed the collapse of the dot-com has resulted in an industry-wide drive towards the delivery of Information Technology (IT) in a way that best delivers business value. This initiative goes under a number of names, including Microsoft's "Agile Enterprise" as well as "Business On Demand" and the "Adaptive Infrastructure". These instantiations do not represent any one technology, but they all share a vision of how IT can be delivered in some way as a service to the business - a service where we can call on functionality to enable dynamic business processes, rather than being dependent on large, monolithic applications and dedicated servers to manage complete areas of the business. ...
01/06/2005 | Enabling_Software_as_a_Service_v2.pdf | VIEW
Working with technology outside the office brings many challenges. Use of laptops has grown from limited user communities to widespread desktop replacement and broad deployment. The complexity of managing these devices outside the walls of the office is something IT departments have learned to address. Remote connection has extended from fixed location dial-in to wireless on the move, and smart handheld devices such as PDAs have become networked, converging with mobile phones. This larger and more diverse community of mobile users and their devices increases the demands on the IT function which has to secure the device, data and connection to the network, keeping control of corporate assets, while at the same time supporting mobile user productivity. ...
01/06/2005 | Mobile devices and users.pdf | VIEW
IT professionals today are now much more on their guard against IT industry hype and spin than they have ever been, and IT vendors have become very wary of their offerings and initiatives acquiring the "marketing hype" label. Yet few major vendors have been able to resist the lure of positioning around Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the "next big thing" in software development and integration. So is there any substance here or is it all just hype to stimulate another wave of technology spending? We consider the views gathered during a study involving over 1350 IT Professionals to help us answer this question. ...
01/06/2005 | SOA_-_Substance_or_Hype_(June_2005).pdf | VIEW
This "Barometer" survey has been carried out in conjunction with The Register. These surveys, which are completed by a group of self-selecting volunteers from The Register's readership, are aimed at giving a broad scale view of the perceptions from the"coal face" - from the very people who face the technical problems on a day-to-day basis. ...
01/05/2005 | Security_Barometer.pdf | VIEW
Purchases of information security protection have traditionally been seen as tactical, against such historical threats as Viruses, Worms and Trojans, and more recently Spyware and Spam - categories of software that can be grouped together under the heading of malicious content. As these threats evolve however, tactical procurements are failing to give companies the comprehensive protection they need, and in the meantime the threats are evolving to take into account the widening range of Internet-based communications mechanisms. ...
01/05/2005 | Content_Security.pdf | VIEW
Email has grown rapidly through open Internet standards and the proliferation of laptops and personal computers. When Canadian company RIM combined cell phone ubiquity with two-way pager simplicity in the BlackBerry, mobile email evolved from laptop connection to encompass a more portable form factor. The BlackBerry appeal is broad, if not yet deep, but the real value to business comes when mobile email is combined with other applications, turning BlackBerry into a mobile platform and bringing it head to head with incumbents like Microsoft. ...
01/05/2005 | Mobile_email_momentum.pdf | VIEW
In the third quarter of 2004, Quocirca reported on the state of Grid Computing adoption in Europe through a set of key market indicators that collectively made up the "Grid Index". In March 2005, these same indicators provide clear insights into the way Grid related activity is developing, but this time on a global basis. ...
05/04/2005 | Grid_Computing_Update_(Apr_2005).pdf | VIEW
This is the annotated slide set to go with the "Migrating to Linux at the Desktop" report. ...
01/04/2005 | linux_desktop_slide_set.pdf | VIEW
