Add-ons let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.
John Fontana (Network World) 30/09/2008 09:11:00
Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok had developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.
Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint's search engine.
IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.
Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.
The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.
The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).
Standard is priced starting at US$299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.
SharePoint is Microsoft's fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a US$1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.
Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.
Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.
Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company's partners.
The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.
Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.
The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.
Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user's access to certain documents while maintaining the user's overall access rights.
"SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access," says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.
Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.
In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.
The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at US$25,000 per server.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
HostReview : Web Hosting Guides : Apps4Rent: Why Windows SharePoint Services?
HostReview : Web Hosting Guides : Apps4Rent: Why Windows SharePoint Services?
Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.
Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
SharePoint: Improving Performance : Beyond Search
SharePoint: Improving Performance : Beyond Search
In my opinion, SharePoint is a slow poke. Among the reasons:
SQL Server bottlenecks
My old pal IIS
Churning when complex pages experience latency because needed data are scattered far and wide across the SharePoint landscape.
In what has to be the most amazing description of sluggish performance, Microsoft has released SharePoint Performance Optimization: How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites . This is a 27 page Word document, which I was able to download here.
I scanned the white paper. I did not dig through it. The good stuff appears after the boilerplate about how to find out what part of the SharePoint system is the problem. In my experience, it’s not “one part”. Performance issues arise when there are lots of users, complex “sites”, and when some of the other required servers are tossed into the stew.
A happy quack to Nick MacKechnie who pointed to this Microsoft white paper in his Web log here.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
In my opinion, SharePoint is a slow poke. Among the reasons:
SQL Server bottlenecks
My old pal IIS
Churning when complex pages experience latency because needed data are scattered far and wide across the SharePoint landscape.
In what has to be the most amazing description of sluggish performance, Microsoft has released SharePoint Performance Optimization: How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites . This is a 27 page Word document, which I was able to download here.
I scanned the white paper. I did not dig through it. The good stuff appears after the boilerplate about how to find out what part of the SharePoint system is the problem. In my experience, it’s not “one part”. Performance issues arise when there are lots of users, complex “sites”, and when some of the other required servers are tossed into the stew.
A happy quack to Nick MacKechnie who pointed to this Microsoft white paper in his Web log here.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
Redmond Developer News | Alfresco Gets SharePoint Savvy
Redmond Developer News | Alfresco Gets SharePoint Savvy
Alfresco Software’s open source enterprise content management system presents a new challenge to SharePoint.
Alfresco Software’s open source enterprise content management system presents a new challenge to SharePoint.
ITWeb :Autonomy 'enterprise-proofs' Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server for large, global enterprise customers
ITWeb :Autonomy 'enterprise-proofs' Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server for large, global enterprise customers
Microsoft hosts Autonomy's software to meet scalability, connectivity and conceptual search requirements of most demanding deployments.
[ Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, California, 22 September 2008 ] - Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced its information processing technology extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to meet customer requirements for scalability, connectivity and conceptual search.
Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software is hosted by Microsoft or deployed onsite by hundreds of large, global MOSS customers to enable SharePoint users to find and process content based on understanding the meaning of information. As an example, IDOL's highly scalable, distributed architecture is in use in one of the world's largest SharePoint retrieval projects, which consists of 400 000 users, 25 000 sites, and over one billion documents.
SharePoint's portal and collaboration capabilities have led to rapid adoption and widespread use in large, geographically dispersed organisations. IDOL's distributed and modular architecture complements MOSS by enabling users to access SharePoint files over Wide Area Networks (WANs), overcoming a major challenge for global companies with distributed servers as Shared Service Providers (SSPs) do not natively support WAN communications. Moreover, encrypted inter-machine and intra-process communication protocols are woven into the fabric of Autonomy's modular design at a fundamental level, providing secure transmission of information throughout the architecture. IDOL routinely supports millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of transactions on distributed commodity servers, with the largest installation exceeding 10 billion documents.
Autonomy further extends global MOSS scalability through its distributed, brokered architecture and "geo-efficient" design, which allows data to be automatically replicated in the most sensible location based on bandwidth, lag time, availability and demand. This enables high performance and gives users aggregated access to all enterprise information in a unified view in globally dispersed environments, while reducing bandwidth overhead. Because IDOL creates a stub, or shortcut, to the data and supports tiered storage rather than requiring that data be stored in SQL Server, organisations using IDOL with SharePoint can further benefit from dramatically reduced SQL Server licences and associated scalability limitations. In addition, large enterprises with complex deployments can take advantage of IDOL's redundancy, load balancing, mirroring and high failover to enable linear scalability, high availability and rapid performance of MOSS.
Autonomy IDOL's mature connector framework, which supports over 400 repositories, is additionally leveraged by organisations with SharePoint to avoid custom creation of IFilters and Protocol Handlers and ensure all data will be indexed. Autonomy IDOL can index and automatically analyse any piece of information from over 1 000 different content formats, unifying enterprise information to allow an unprecedented view of the organisation's information assets. This enables SharePoint to transform from a departmental collaboration solution to enterprise collaboration.
Furthermore, Autonomy's advanced conceptual search functionality supplements native MOSS capabilities to enrich the search experience. IDOL forms an understanding of the content of any given page and makes contextual associations between pages, documents, multimedia and search queries to ensure users are always provided with information that is particularly relevant to them. Using the idea behind the given words, and not just the words themselves, IDOL avoids inaccuracy and retrieves not just the most popular content, but the most pertinent.
"SharePoint delivers excellent 'interface and workflow' frameworks for productivity and content applications, but the large and growing volumes of users and rapid increases in content in SharePoint deployments necessitate the highest levels of security and scalability, which Autonomy delivers," commented Mike Lynch, chief executive officer of Autonomy. "The advanced pan-enterprise search capabilities of IDOL leverage Meaning-Based Computing technology to form a conceptual understanding of all data, regardless of what or where it is. This enables customers to capitalise on their SharePoint investments and harness the full richness of human information."
Autonomy provides Microsoft's SharePoint Server customers with:
* A conceptual understanding of the information within MOSS to proactively make connections between users, enhancing collaboration among them.
* A modular, distributed architecture supporting enterprise-class scalability for hundreds of thousands of enterprise users accessing hundreds of terabytes of data with sub-second response, indexing in excess of 110GB/hour and supporting over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms.
* Unique Mapped Security and native support for all enterprise security models, permitting MOSS to be run within security sensitive environments, such as DOD 5015, EAL, and Bell-LaPadula.
* Extension of standard Microsoft's IFilter file support from 16 to 1 000+ file formats, including ODF and PDFX, with native support for over 400 repositories regardless of operating system.
* Over 500 advanced functions, such as expertise location, communities, implicit profiling, explicit personalisation, automatic categorisation, clustering, geo searching, automatic query guidance, and automatic hyperlinking.
Autonomy
Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L) is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement. Autonomy's technology allows computers to harness the full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video. Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications, including information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis, and is recognised by industry analysts as the clear leader in enterprise search.
Autonomy's customer base comprises of more than 17 000 global companies and organisations, including: 3, ABN AMRO, AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyd TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, T-Mobile, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. More than 350 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including BEA, Citrix, EDS, H-P, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO, and the company has over 400 VARs and Systems Integrators. The company has offices worldwide.
Autonomy and the Autonomy logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autonomy Corporation plc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Microsoft hosts Autonomy's software to meet scalability, connectivity and conceptual search requirements of most demanding deployments.
[ Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, California, 22 September 2008 ] - Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced its information processing technology extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to meet customer requirements for scalability, connectivity and conceptual search.
Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software is hosted by Microsoft or deployed onsite by hundreds of large, global MOSS customers to enable SharePoint users to find and process content based on understanding the meaning of information. As an example, IDOL's highly scalable, distributed architecture is in use in one of the world's largest SharePoint retrieval projects, which consists of 400 000 users, 25 000 sites, and over one billion documents.
SharePoint's portal and collaboration capabilities have led to rapid adoption and widespread use in large, geographically dispersed organisations. IDOL's distributed and modular architecture complements MOSS by enabling users to access SharePoint files over Wide Area Networks (WANs), overcoming a major challenge for global companies with distributed servers as Shared Service Providers (SSPs) do not natively support WAN communications. Moreover, encrypted inter-machine and intra-process communication protocols are woven into the fabric of Autonomy's modular design at a fundamental level, providing secure transmission of information throughout the architecture. IDOL routinely supports millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of transactions on distributed commodity servers, with the largest installation exceeding 10 billion documents.
Autonomy further extends global MOSS scalability through its distributed, brokered architecture and "geo-efficient" design, which allows data to be automatically replicated in the most sensible location based on bandwidth, lag time, availability and demand. This enables high performance and gives users aggregated access to all enterprise information in a unified view in globally dispersed environments, while reducing bandwidth overhead. Because IDOL creates a stub, or shortcut, to the data and supports tiered storage rather than requiring that data be stored in SQL Server, organisations using IDOL with SharePoint can further benefit from dramatically reduced SQL Server licences and associated scalability limitations. In addition, large enterprises with complex deployments can take advantage of IDOL's redundancy, load balancing, mirroring and high failover to enable linear scalability, high availability and rapid performance of MOSS.
Autonomy IDOL's mature connector framework, which supports over 400 repositories, is additionally leveraged by organisations with SharePoint to avoid custom creation of IFilters and Protocol Handlers and ensure all data will be indexed. Autonomy IDOL can index and automatically analyse any piece of information from over 1 000 different content formats, unifying enterprise information to allow an unprecedented view of the organisation's information assets. This enables SharePoint to transform from a departmental collaboration solution to enterprise collaboration.
Furthermore, Autonomy's advanced conceptual search functionality supplements native MOSS capabilities to enrich the search experience. IDOL forms an understanding of the content of any given page and makes contextual associations between pages, documents, multimedia and search queries to ensure users are always provided with information that is particularly relevant to them. Using the idea behind the given words, and not just the words themselves, IDOL avoids inaccuracy and retrieves not just the most popular content, but the most pertinent.
"SharePoint delivers excellent 'interface and workflow' frameworks for productivity and content applications, but the large and growing volumes of users and rapid increases in content in SharePoint deployments necessitate the highest levels of security and scalability, which Autonomy delivers," commented Mike Lynch, chief executive officer of Autonomy. "The advanced pan-enterprise search capabilities of IDOL leverage Meaning-Based Computing technology to form a conceptual understanding of all data, regardless of what or where it is. This enables customers to capitalise on their SharePoint investments and harness the full richness of human information."
Autonomy provides Microsoft's SharePoint Server customers with:
* A conceptual understanding of the information within MOSS to proactively make connections between users, enhancing collaboration among them.
* A modular, distributed architecture supporting enterprise-class scalability for hundreds of thousands of enterprise users accessing hundreds of terabytes of data with sub-second response, indexing in excess of 110GB/hour and supporting over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms.
* Unique Mapped Security and native support for all enterprise security models, permitting MOSS to be run within security sensitive environments, such as DOD 5015, EAL, and Bell-LaPadula.
* Extension of standard Microsoft's IFilter file support from 16 to 1 000+ file formats, including ODF and PDFX, with native support for over 400 repositories regardless of operating system.
* Over 500 advanced functions, such as expertise location, communities, implicit profiling, explicit personalisation, automatic categorisation, clustering, geo searching, automatic query guidance, and automatic hyperlinking.
Autonomy
Autonomy Corporation (LSE: AU. or AU.L) is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement. Autonomy's technology allows computers to harness the full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video. Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications, including information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis, and is recognised by industry analysts as the clear leader in enterprise search.
Autonomy's customer base comprises of more than 17 000 global companies and organisations, including: 3, ABN AMRO, AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyd TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, T-Mobile, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. More than 350 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including BEA, Citrix, EDS, H-P, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO, and the company has over 400 VARs and Systems Integrators. The company has offices worldwide.
Autonomy and the Autonomy logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autonomy Corporation plc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Gustaf's Microsoft Dynamics CRM & SharePoint Blog: The power of SharePoint
Gustaf's Microsoft Dynamics CRM & SharePoint Blog: The power of SharePoint
The power of SharePoint
Presently I am employed at Logica as a consultant and the projects I am involved in are always Dynamcis CRM centered. However, I used to work at Humandata earlier, run by the SharePoint MVP Göran Husman and I am since this time a devoted SharePoint fan.
Apart from this, it is also a great tool for running projects in. Instead of millions of post-its with all the questionsmarks in the project, we use a discussion board. Instead of impossible hierarchies of folder for SureStep documents, we use one Document Library with Meta-data describing what part of SureStep the document should be connected to. This way, documents are easier to find, easier to work with, easier to share and we get version control all for free.
The power of SharePoint
Presently I am employed at Logica as a consultant and the projects I am involved in are always Dynamcis CRM centered. However, I used to work at Humandata earlier, run by the SharePoint MVP Göran Husman and I am since this time a devoted SharePoint fan.
Apart from this, it is also a great tool for running projects in. Instead of millions of post-its with all the questionsmarks in the project, we use a discussion board. Instead of impossible hierarchies of folder for SureStep documents, we use one Document Library with Meta-data describing what part of SureStep the document should be connected to. This way, documents are easier to find, easier to work with, easier to share and we get version control all for free.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
FT.com / Digital Business / Personal view - Going for a song
FT.com / Digital Business / Personal view - Going for a song
Going for a song
By David Ford, chief executive of Securecoms Ltd
Published: September 18 2008 16:52 | Last updated: September 18 2008 16:52
Keeping confidential information secure seems to be getting harder and harder. It’s not enough to protect your own networks, computers and storage devices – you must also worry about anyone else who might hold your data.
We need to consider very carefully what happens to confidential and personal information when it’s in our possession and, importantly, when it leaves our offices. Electronic data takes on a life of its own. While photocopying paper files is a lengthy undertaking, copies of electronic data are created in moments and then cease to be accounted for. Just ask someone to look at the contents of their USB stick – almost always you’ll find documents there which should have been deleted long ago.
With scandals about sensitive data being lost, or popping up where it shouldn’t, seeming to occur daily the urgency of addressing the security implications of our ever-increasing technological capabilities has become acute. We are now exploring the security of the various devices we carry outside the office but we’re still overlooking the main route by which confidential information leaves the security of our office networks – e-mail.
Every day, highly confidential information travels round the internet insecurely. We wouldn’t dream of entering our credit card details on an insecure web page; we certainly wouldn’t conduct our online banking that way but we use e-mail to transport the majority of written business communication. Businesses of all sizes, and their advisers, send every conceivable sort of confidential information via e-mail – either contained directly in the e-mail or, increasingly, using e-mail as the conduit to send documents as attachments.
Using e-mail is like sending your communications by postcard. Actually it’s worse than that. Postcards, at least, remain in the possession of the post office until delivered. E-mails, on the other hand, travel across an insecure public network and pass through many unknown points before arriving at their destination.
We rage when we hear the latest story about a government laptop being lost or stolen, or a memory stick being mislaid, or CDs being lost in the post, yet we are all guilty of similar security lapses by sending unprotected confidential information out via e-mail.
Public companies, for example, send price-sensitive information to their various advisers during the periods before the making of announcements via e-mail. The Financial Services Authority has expressed concern that there is too much leakage of sensitive information and has reviewed the whole area of IT. However, although it recognised that external network connections should be secured by encryption (recommending the use of VPNs), it made no similar recommendations in connection with the encryption of e-mails. It made the obvious point that sensitive information should not be e-mailed to web-based e-mail accounts (presumably they meant free e-mail accounts) and that “address auto-complete” should be disabled, but didn’t devote any deep thought to the whole issue of the insecurity of e-mail.
Similarly, the Information Commissioner’s Office has not tackled the issue of insecure e-mail. The ICO accepts that sending unencrypted e-mail on open networks poses a security risk but, since its resources are stretched, it is concentrating on what it sees as more pressing problems – unencrypted laptops, disks and memory sticks. In other words it is not prepared to take a lead, preferring to react to events after they occur.
The only organisations in the UK that have made clear recommendations on this topic are the Law Society and the Bar Council. However, despite this advice from their professional bodies, more than 99 per cent of e-mails sent by solicitors and barristers are still sent insecurely.
The situation is not complicated. We have developed technologies that enable us to store and manipulate masses of personal and confidential information with ease. These capabilities impose a responsibility on us to ensure information is kept securely. We have accepted for some time that we must keep our internal networks secure.
However, now that it has become so easy to take or send information outside the secure environments we have built, we must ensure it is properly protected en route. This must be true whether information is carried on a laptop or a USB stick or sent out on a CD or an e-mail. An appropriate form of encryption is the only real security solution.
Until this simple principle is adopted by all of the main regulatory authorities and the message clearly conveyed to all of us who deal in confidences, whether our own or others, nothing will be done. Only when secure e-mail becomes an expected norm will we adopt the necessary systems to ensure that stories about yet another scandalous loss of personal data or confidential information have become a thing of the past.
David Ford is chief executive of Securecoms Ltd and former managing partner of Tarlo Lyons, the law firm
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Going for a song
By David Ford, chief executive of Securecoms Ltd
Published: September 18 2008 16:52 | Last updated: September 18 2008 16:52
Keeping confidential information secure seems to be getting harder and harder. It’s not enough to protect your own networks, computers and storage devices – you must also worry about anyone else who might hold your data.
We need to consider very carefully what happens to confidential and personal information when it’s in our possession and, importantly, when it leaves our offices. Electronic data takes on a life of its own. While photocopying paper files is a lengthy undertaking, copies of electronic data are created in moments and then cease to be accounted for. Just ask someone to look at the contents of their USB stick – almost always you’ll find documents there which should have been deleted long ago.
With scandals about sensitive data being lost, or popping up where it shouldn’t, seeming to occur daily the urgency of addressing the security implications of our ever-increasing technological capabilities has become acute. We are now exploring the security of the various devices we carry outside the office but we’re still overlooking the main route by which confidential information leaves the security of our office networks – e-mail.
Every day, highly confidential information travels round the internet insecurely. We wouldn’t dream of entering our credit card details on an insecure web page; we certainly wouldn’t conduct our online banking that way but we use e-mail to transport the majority of written business communication. Businesses of all sizes, and their advisers, send every conceivable sort of confidential information via e-mail – either contained directly in the e-mail or, increasingly, using e-mail as the conduit to send documents as attachments.
Using e-mail is like sending your communications by postcard. Actually it’s worse than that. Postcards, at least, remain in the possession of the post office until delivered. E-mails, on the other hand, travel across an insecure public network and pass through many unknown points before arriving at their destination.
We rage when we hear the latest story about a government laptop being lost or stolen, or a memory stick being mislaid, or CDs being lost in the post, yet we are all guilty of similar security lapses by sending unprotected confidential information out via e-mail.
Public companies, for example, send price-sensitive information to their various advisers during the periods before the making of announcements via e-mail. The Financial Services Authority has expressed concern that there is too much leakage of sensitive information and has reviewed the whole area of IT. However, although it recognised that external network connections should be secured by encryption (recommending the use of VPNs), it made no similar recommendations in connection with the encryption of e-mails. It made the obvious point that sensitive information should not be e-mailed to web-based e-mail accounts (presumably they meant free e-mail accounts) and that “address auto-complete” should be disabled, but didn’t devote any deep thought to the whole issue of the insecurity of e-mail.
Similarly, the Information Commissioner’s Office has not tackled the issue of insecure e-mail. The ICO accepts that sending unencrypted e-mail on open networks poses a security risk but, since its resources are stretched, it is concentrating on what it sees as more pressing problems – unencrypted laptops, disks and memory sticks. In other words it is not prepared to take a lead, preferring to react to events after they occur.
The only organisations in the UK that have made clear recommendations on this topic are the Law Society and the Bar Council. However, despite this advice from their professional bodies, more than 99 per cent of e-mails sent by solicitors and barristers are still sent insecurely.
The situation is not complicated. We have developed technologies that enable us to store and manipulate masses of personal and confidential information with ease. These capabilities impose a responsibility on us to ensure information is kept securely. We have accepted for some time that we must keep our internal networks secure.
However, now that it has become so easy to take or send information outside the secure environments we have built, we must ensure it is properly protected en route. This must be true whether information is carried on a laptop or a USB stick or sent out on a CD or an e-mail. An appropriate form of encryption is the only real security solution.
Until this simple principle is adopted by all of the main regulatory authorities and the message clearly conveyed to all of us who deal in confidences, whether our own or others, nothing will be done. Only when secure e-mail becomes an expected norm will we adopt the necessary systems to ensure that stories about yet another scandalous loss of personal data or confidential information have become a thing of the past.
David Ford is chief executive of Securecoms Ltd and former managing partner of Tarlo Lyons, the law firm
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Improve Your Collaboration with Microsoft® SharePoint®-based Solutions
Improve Your Collaboration with Microsoft® SharePoint®-based Solutions
Information sharing, both inside and outside the enterprise, continues to be a challenge for many organizations. BearingPoint believes that distributed information management supported by a centralized management infrastructure can help address this issue. We have been collaborating with Microsoft for nearly 10 years; we’re building on that experience to create enterprise information solutions based on Microsoft® SharePoint® technology.
Microsoft® SharePoint® provides a framework that can help improve:
- Collaboration
- Business intelligence
- Business processes
- Content management
- Search capabilities
SharePoint® -based solutions can help organizations manage information seamlessly across their enterprise. This technology facilitates collaboration and distributed project management by supporting central deployment of the infrastructure needed to create and support cross-enterprise activities. The technology is non-intrusive and integrates with desktop applications. However, it is also far reaching in terms of supporting the complex workflows and information sharing that communities of interests require.
BearingPoint consultants can combine SharePoint® with other core Microsoft technologies to create customized solutions that provide rich security, document management and collaboration features. And SharePoint® -based applications can grow as your organization grows and evolves.
Learn more about SharePoint®-based Solutions. Contact Us
Information sharing, both inside and outside the enterprise, continues to be a challenge for many organizations. BearingPoint believes that distributed information management supported by a centralized management infrastructure can help address this issue. We have been collaborating with Microsoft for nearly 10 years; we’re building on that experience to create enterprise information solutions based on Microsoft® SharePoint® technology.
Microsoft® SharePoint® provides a framework that can help improve:
- Collaboration
- Business intelligence
- Business processes
- Content management
- Search capabilities
SharePoint® -based solutions can help organizations manage information seamlessly across their enterprise. This technology facilitates collaboration and distributed project management by supporting central deployment of the infrastructure needed to create and support cross-enterprise activities. The technology is non-intrusive and integrates with desktop applications. However, it is also far reaching in terms of supporting the complex workflows and information sharing that communities of interests require.
BearingPoint consultants can combine SharePoint® with other core Microsoft technologies to create customized solutions that provide rich security, document management and collaboration features. And SharePoint® -based applications can grow as your organization grows and evolves.
Learn more about SharePoint®-based Solutions. Contact Us
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Information governance – more than a guiding force? (FT.com)
Information governance – more than a guiding force?
By Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy
Published: September 16 2008 11:40 | Last updated: September 16 2008 11:40
Corporate attitudes to information governance are changing. The exponential growth of information that is created and cultivated within a business has in many ways become as much a liability as it has an asset.
Regulatory fines, internal fraud, and class action lawsuits, unexpected personal data leaks and loss can cost a business millions, and impact the corporate brand with a backlash of public opinion which can devastate a company for years and in some cases, such as that of Arthur Andersen, the damage can be irreversible.
In the corporate world these days the smoking gun is often found on a server and that is where the regulator has learned to look.
The two extreme policies of keeping everything, or alternatively keeping nothing, are in most industries now illegal and certainly out of date. While we may long for the days when a midnight e-mail from IT could kindly ask employees to clean up their network folders, stop using personal hard drives, or refrain from deleting germane files needed in a legal case, organisations are recognising that the potential damage from rogue (or uninformed) employees far outweighs reliance on principle alone.
These risks are driving organisations to implement strict information policies for accessing, holding and disposing of data in a timely manner to ensure compliance and avoid hefty fines or, in the worst cases, criminal prosecution.
Gone are the days when compliance used to be determined by a filing cabinet. Today more than 80 per cent of data in the enterprise is not neatly organised on shelves and resides outside the scope of structured databases on laptops, servers, and mobile devices across corporate divisions, languages and geographic boundaries.
With documents, e-mails, instant messages, blogs, and audio files being created at uncontrollable levels, and a huge influx of rich media into the business, this content has become particularly hard to retrieve, systematise and certainly govern.
Traditional approaches where companies simply preserve everything cannot be sustained. The cost of storage is far more than hardware alone, and organisations struggle to use basic search technologies to find relevant information when needed. Data protection laws may not allow retention and in any case unnecessarily retained information can cause cost and unexpected liability, for example during e-discovery for lawsuits.
The sheer volume of this unstructured data and the crude number of governing policies that can affect content have for long nourished the misconception that an organisation needs an army of professionals stationed at every digital intersection to decide the appropriate course of action: a model as unappealing as it is impractical.
True information governance goes beyond merely alerting a compliance officer to a potential set of policy violations or counting the number of privacy breaches. It includes broad control and action and does not leave enforcement to individuals who are unable to keep up with the volume and speed of modern business. This should happen in real-time with visibility into the process to foster collaboration among compliance officers, legal, and IT.
Unfortunately these challenges have led many executives to operate under the misguided notion that true information governance can only exist as a guiding force and not a proposed reality.
They fail to realise that a fundamental shift in the way computers operate enables intelligence and automation within governance. Meaning-based computing allows computers to ingest information in its native human-friendly format, form a conceptual understanding of the content, its inherent rules and security entitlements, and take action upon it.
This ability of computers to understand the meaning of data – the who, when, where and how of content – enables a fundamental shift from manual to automated, consistent, and secure governance.
Technology can now read an e-mail as it is sent, realise it is a compliance issue and prevent it being sent out. It can analyse the files on a laptop and lock down those relevant to a legal case. It can take a message and realise it concerns a national of a country that does not allow information on its citizens to be held outside its borders and route it to the right server for storage. It can take a message, read it and understand it and decide that it must be archived for seven years, while another message for only 30 days. Then after the allotted time it can automatically delete them.
By gaining a conceptual understanding of all corporate data, one is able to utilise a policy-based approach effectively to execute all processes associated with the retention, supervision and ultimate disposition of electronic information. Organisations are able to define and apply policies at the point of data creation, automating information classification based on its content, flagging any non-compliant documents, preserving data in archives and integrating disposition management systems that can honour any legal holds.
Just as we saw Sarbanes Oxley as a response to the Enron era, it is likely we will see a further acceleration of information governance regulations as a response to the events of the sub-prime crisis.
These new rules along with the consequences of the recent changes in the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), Data Protection legislation, Compliance regulations and many countries’ new geographic storage rules will drive the need for companies to take a pan-enterprise view of information governance.
By automating information governance to reduce business risk, we ultimately safeguard the guiding principles that drive the vast majority of employees and officers to protect the integrity of the corporate brand, while not impeding the creativity and flexibility that drive value in modern business.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy
Published: September 16 2008 11:40 | Last updated: September 16 2008 11:40
Corporate attitudes to information governance are changing. The exponential growth of information that is created and cultivated within a business has in many ways become as much a liability as it has an asset.
Regulatory fines, internal fraud, and class action lawsuits, unexpected personal data leaks and loss can cost a business millions, and impact the corporate brand with a backlash of public opinion which can devastate a company for years and in some cases, such as that of Arthur Andersen, the damage can be irreversible.
In the corporate world these days the smoking gun is often found on a server and that is where the regulator has learned to look.
The two extreme policies of keeping everything, or alternatively keeping nothing, are in most industries now illegal and certainly out of date. While we may long for the days when a midnight e-mail from IT could kindly ask employees to clean up their network folders, stop using personal hard drives, or refrain from deleting germane files needed in a legal case, organisations are recognising that the potential damage from rogue (or uninformed) employees far outweighs reliance on principle alone.
These risks are driving organisations to implement strict information policies for accessing, holding and disposing of data in a timely manner to ensure compliance and avoid hefty fines or, in the worst cases, criminal prosecution.
Gone are the days when compliance used to be determined by a filing cabinet. Today more than 80 per cent of data in the enterprise is not neatly organised on shelves and resides outside the scope of structured databases on laptops, servers, and mobile devices across corporate divisions, languages and geographic boundaries.
With documents, e-mails, instant messages, blogs, and audio files being created at uncontrollable levels, and a huge influx of rich media into the business, this content has become particularly hard to retrieve, systematise and certainly govern.
Traditional approaches where companies simply preserve everything cannot be sustained. The cost of storage is far more than hardware alone, and organisations struggle to use basic search technologies to find relevant information when needed. Data protection laws may not allow retention and in any case unnecessarily retained information can cause cost and unexpected liability, for example during e-discovery for lawsuits.
The sheer volume of this unstructured data and the crude number of governing policies that can affect content have for long nourished the misconception that an organisation needs an army of professionals stationed at every digital intersection to decide the appropriate course of action: a model as unappealing as it is impractical.
True information governance goes beyond merely alerting a compliance officer to a potential set of policy violations or counting the number of privacy breaches. It includes broad control and action and does not leave enforcement to individuals who are unable to keep up with the volume and speed of modern business. This should happen in real-time with visibility into the process to foster collaboration among compliance officers, legal, and IT.
Unfortunately these challenges have led many executives to operate under the misguided notion that true information governance can only exist as a guiding force and not a proposed reality.
They fail to realise that a fundamental shift in the way computers operate enables intelligence and automation within governance. Meaning-based computing allows computers to ingest information in its native human-friendly format, form a conceptual understanding of the content, its inherent rules and security entitlements, and take action upon it.
This ability of computers to understand the meaning of data – the who, when, where and how of content – enables a fundamental shift from manual to automated, consistent, and secure governance.
Technology can now read an e-mail as it is sent, realise it is a compliance issue and prevent it being sent out. It can analyse the files on a laptop and lock down those relevant to a legal case. It can take a message and realise it concerns a national of a country that does not allow information on its citizens to be held outside its borders and route it to the right server for storage. It can take a message, read it and understand it and decide that it must be archived for seven years, while another message for only 30 days. Then after the allotted time it can automatically delete them.
By gaining a conceptual understanding of all corporate data, one is able to utilise a policy-based approach effectively to execute all processes associated with the retention, supervision and ultimate disposition of electronic information. Organisations are able to define and apply policies at the point of data creation, automating information classification based on its content, flagging any non-compliant documents, preserving data in archives and integrating disposition management systems that can honour any legal holds.
Just as we saw Sarbanes Oxley as a response to the Enron era, it is likely we will see a further acceleration of information governance regulations as a response to the events of the sub-prime crisis.
These new rules along with the consequences of the recent changes in the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), Data Protection legislation, Compliance regulations and many countries’ new geographic storage rules will drive the need for companies to take a pan-enterprise view of information governance.
By automating information governance to reduce business risk, we ultimately safeguard the guiding principles that drive the vast majority of employees and officers to protect the integrity of the corporate brand, while not impeding the creativity and flexibility that drive value in modern business.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Who will be the new king of CRM?
Who will be the new king of CRM?
By Geoff Nairn
Published: September 15 2008 14:29 | Last updated: September 15 2008 14:29
While the debate about hosted or on-premise customer relationship management software rages, Oracle claims to offer the best of both worlds. Its Oracle CRM On Demand Integration to Siebel CRM product synchronises customer data held in Oracle CRM On Demand – Oracle’s home-grown on-demand CRM offering – with Siebel CRM, which Oracle owns after acquiring Siebel Systems in 2005.
Siebel remains the undisputed king for traditional on-premises CRM but most of the growth in the CRM industry now comes from newer on-demand CRM providers such as Salesforce.com.
Improved world view
IBM has unveiled new software to help businesses make sense of their product data. InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Product Information Server aims to provide a “single view” of all the information held on a product across geographic locations. Big Blue also added a global name recognition module for InfoSphere Information Server to improve name matching for businesses that operate in many countries.
Small and affordable
Dell is targeting small businesses in emerging markets with the four latest additions to its Vostro range of PCs launched in Beijing.
Affordability is the key selling point of the Vostro A860 and A840, two laptops that come with 15.6-inch or 14.1-inch HD screens, Celeron or Core 2 Duo processors and a choice of operating system – Ubuntu Linux or Windows Vista. There are also two desktop mini-towers, the Vostro 180 and A100 – interestingly the latter only comes with Ubuntu.
Virtual security gates
Internet security firm Check Software Technologies has introduced a virtual security gateway aimed at the growing number of businesses with virtualised IT environments.
VPN-1 Virtual Edition is optimised for VMware environments and provides similar levels of security for virtualised applications to those located on separate servers, the company claims. Pricing starts at $7,500 for five virtual machines.
Aid to compliance
Microsoft has teamed up with BearingPoint – KPMG Consulting as was – to offer a compliance product based on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2007. BearingPoint Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance helps organisations manage risk and compliance using alerts and analytical tools.
For example, if a key risk indicator is exceeded, e-mail alerts are triggered and employees guided through the necessary steps.
Red flag for danger
EMC aims to address the growing problem of identity theft with a solution comprising software and services. The catalyst for the new offering is the Facta regulations in the US which require organisations to put in place policies and procedures to address the risk of identity theft in a systematic fashion by detecting warning signs or “red flags”. EMC’s Facta Red Flags product is designed to help financial institutions and creditors meet the November 1 Facta deadline.
“Powered by Google”
Google has announced a new version of the Google Search Appliance, which integrates hardware and software is aimed at organisations that want to add a “powered by Google” sticker to their corporate intranet or website.
The appliance can index all of an organisation’s content, up to 10m documents, in a single box. It can also search the information held on leading content management systems such as EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Livelink and Microsoft SharePoint.
Siren call of open source
System management is the latest part of the software business to succumb to the advances of the open source movement. Fujitsu Siemens has announced that its Primergy servers can now be managed and monitored with the Nagios open source software suite.
Specialist outfit Netways has developed a downloadable plug-in that allows Nagios to monitor Fujitsu Siemens’ hardware for a wide range of variables such as network services, server resources and system temperature.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Geoff Nairn
Published: September 15 2008 14:29 | Last updated: September 15 2008 14:29
While the debate about hosted or on-premise customer relationship management software rages, Oracle claims to offer the best of both worlds. Its Oracle CRM On Demand Integration to Siebel CRM product synchronises customer data held in Oracle CRM On Demand – Oracle’s home-grown on-demand CRM offering – with Siebel CRM, which Oracle owns after acquiring Siebel Systems in 2005.
Siebel remains the undisputed king for traditional on-premises CRM but most of the growth in the CRM industry now comes from newer on-demand CRM providers such as Salesforce.com.
Improved world view
IBM has unveiled new software to help businesses make sense of their product data. InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Product Information Server aims to provide a “single view” of all the information held on a product across geographic locations. Big Blue also added a global name recognition module for InfoSphere Information Server to improve name matching for businesses that operate in many countries.
Small and affordable
Dell is targeting small businesses in emerging markets with the four latest additions to its Vostro range of PCs launched in Beijing.
Affordability is the key selling point of the Vostro A860 and A840, two laptops that come with 15.6-inch or 14.1-inch HD screens, Celeron or Core 2 Duo processors and a choice of operating system – Ubuntu Linux or Windows Vista. There are also two desktop mini-towers, the Vostro 180 and A100 – interestingly the latter only comes with Ubuntu.
Virtual security gates
Internet security firm Check Software Technologies has introduced a virtual security gateway aimed at the growing number of businesses with virtualised IT environments.
VPN-1 Virtual Edition is optimised for VMware environments and provides similar levels of security for virtualised applications to those located on separate servers, the company claims. Pricing starts at $7,500 for five virtual machines.
Aid to compliance
Microsoft has teamed up with BearingPoint – KPMG Consulting as was – to offer a compliance product based on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2007. BearingPoint Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance helps organisations manage risk and compliance using alerts and analytical tools.
For example, if a key risk indicator is exceeded, e-mail alerts are triggered and employees guided through the necessary steps.
Red flag for danger
EMC aims to address the growing problem of identity theft with a solution comprising software and services. The catalyst for the new offering is the Facta regulations in the US which require organisations to put in place policies and procedures to address the risk of identity theft in a systematic fashion by detecting warning signs or “red flags”. EMC’s Facta Red Flags product is designed to help financial institutions and creditors meet the November 1 Facta deadline.
“Powered by Google”
Google has announced a new version of the Google Search Appliance, which integrates hardware and software is aimed at organisations that want to add a “powered by Google” sticker to their corporate intranet or website.
The appliance can index all of an organisation’s content, up to 10m documents, in a single box. It can also search the information held on leading content management systems such as EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Livelink and Microsoft SharePoint.
Siren call of open source
System management is the latest part of the software business to succumb to the advances of the open source movement. Fujitsu Siemens has announced that its Primergy servers can now be managed and monitored with the Nagios open source software suite.
Specialist outfit Netways has developed a downloadable plug-in that allows Nagios to monitor Fujitsu Siemens’ hardware for a wide range of variables such as network services, server resources and system temperature.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
The next generation gap: IT and Web 2.0 (FT.com)
The next generation gap: IT and Web 2.0
By Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer for Webroot
Published: September 12 2008 17:15 | Last updated: September 12 2008 17:15
Once, if you were “twittering” you would be nervous, and a “face book” was a catalogue of known criminals. Now, Twitter and Facebook are two of the fastest growing Web 2.0 collaboration applications. Until recently they merely kept a younger generation of technology-fluent “Generation Ys” up late at night; now they are causing sleepless nights for IT management because of the security holes they represent.
Over the past decade, many fundamental business activities – marketing, advertising, customer support, sales transactions – have become web dependent. At the same time, the web is now considered the number one delivery mechanism for malware. This poses a significant security challenge to companies due to adoption of Web 2.0 technology (blogs, video, wikis, internet messaging, social networking sites, RSS feeds and similar elements) – the communication tools of choice for Gen Y.
In the next 10 years 71m Gen Y (18-30 year-olds) will enter the workforce with their favored tools for communication, researching and collaborating. Gen Y thrives on flexibility and is used to having information a click away using Web 2.0 technology. In a recent survey by Blessingwhite of employees in the UK and Ireland, 23 per cent of Gen Y employees felt they were fully engaged and taking pride in helping the organisation achieve its goals when they felt it was aligned with their own values, goals and aspirations. This alignment is the best method for achieving sustainable employee engagement.
Even though there are a number of social software tools that IT managers can comfortably deploy within their enterprise network, such Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections, they don’t compare with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook. The latest ComScore data show that Facebook’s 90m user network grew 153 per cent last year globally and by more than 303 per cent in Europe where the site recorded 37m unique visitors in June alone. Gen Y youngsters depend on social-networking to organise their lives and interact with colleagues. Blocking access or using URL filtering alone is not the answer because they don’t fully answer the problem and a restrictive corporate environment will not be appealing to these bright college graduates.
And, with 85 per cent of all threats coming from the web, and with at least 5 per cent of heavily trafficked “trusted” web sites now harbouring malware, URL filtering systems and blocking alone can’t begin to protect a network since they can’t detect or stop malware or phishing attacks.
In a recent exploit, Facebook users received a post on their “wall” to view a video. Viewers were then redirected to a fake Google site with a message telling them to download a viewer. The payload was actually a Trojan Horse that downloaded spyware and keyloggers. According to Gartner, almost 50 per cent of companies do not block access or monitor this type of activity on social networking sites. With this type of web threat, it’s no wonder that IT departments are struggling to clean up malware pouring through these gaping security holes, let alone preventing data breaches, monitoring policy and employee productivity, and minimizing corporate liability to objectionable content.
What IT managers can do:
•Only block social-networking or websites after careful review (from legal and HR departments) where there is significant corporate risk that can’t be mitigated any other way
•Employ a dynamic, perimeter web security solution that can filter inbound pages for spyware and viruses; provides URL filtering for known inappropriate sites (sexual content, violence, etc); supports outbound data leak prevention by content scanning; and, can respond instantly to changing threats
•Work with HR and Legal to update employee guidelines to support acceptable Internet use policies and guidelines
•Train users on the hazards of indiscriminate use of social-networking and web sites
•Protect mobile laptop users.
What employees should do
•When using personal web mail accounts, do not click on links in your e-mail
•When visiting social networking sites, do not download applications without checking on the vendor
•Don’t download videos without proper security against spyware and viruses
•Don’t post your profile on a public social networking site if it identifies your employer and it can have a negative impact on the company’s reputation.
•Always be sure your antispyware and antivirus protection is up to date and that your personal data is protected using a secure online backup system.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer for Webroot
Published: September 12 2008 17:15 | Last updated: September 12 2008 17:15
Once, if you were “twittering” you would be nervous, and a “face book” was a catalogue of known criminals. Now, Twitter and Facebook are two of the fastest growing Web 2.0 collaboration applications. Until recently they merely kept a younger generation of technology-fluent “Generation Ys” up late at night; now they are causing sleepless nights for IT management because of the security holes they represent.
Over the past decade, many fundamental business activities – marketing, advertising, customer support, sales transactions – have become web dependent. At the same time, the web is now considered the number one delivery mechanism for malware. This poses a significant security challenge to companies due to adoption of Web 2.0 technology (blogs, video, wikis, internet messaging, social networking sites, RSS feeds and similar elements) – the communication tools of choice for Gen Y.
In the next 10 years 71m Gen Y (18-30 year-olds) will enter the workforce with their favored tools for communication, researching and collaborating. Gen Y thrives on flexibility and is used to having information a click away using Web 2.0 technology. In a recent survey by Blessingwhite of employees in the UK and Ireland, 23 per cent of Gen Y employees felt they were fully engaged and taking pride in helping the organisation achieve its goals when they felt it was aligned with their own values, goals and aspirations. This alignment is the best method for achieving sustainable employee engagement.
Even though there are a number of social software tools that IT managers can comfortably deploy within their enterprise network, such Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections, they don’t compare with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook. The latest ComScore data show that Facebook’s 90m user network grew 153 per cent last year globally and by more than 303 per cent in Europe where the site recorded 37m unique visitors in June alone. Gen Y youngsters depend on social-networking to organise their lives and interact with colleagues. Blocking access or using URL filtering alone is not the answer because they don’t fully answer the problem and a restrictive corporate environment will not be appealing to these bright college graduates.
And, with 85 per cent of all threats coming from the web, and with at least 5 per cent of heavily trafficked “trusted” web sites now harbouring malware, URL filtering systems and blocking alone can’t begin to protect a network since they can’t detect or stop malware or phishing attacks.
In a recent exploit, Facebook users received a post on their “wall” to view a video. Viewers were then redirected to a fake Google site with a message telling them to download a viewer. The payload was actually a Trojan Horse that downloaded spyware and keyloggers. According to Gartner, almost 50 per cent of companies do not block access or monitor this type of activity on social networking sites. With this type of web threat, it’s no wonder that IT departments are struggling to clean up malware pouring through these gaping security holes, let alone preventing data breaches, monitoring policy and employee productivity, and minimizing corporate liability to objectionable content.
What IT managers can do:
•Only block social-networking or websites after careful review (from legal and HR departments) where there is significant corporate risk that can’t be mitigated any other way
•Employ a dynamic, perimeter web security solution that can filter inbound pages for spyware and viruses; provides URL filtering for known inappropriate sites (sexual content, violence, etc); supports outbound data leak prevention by content scanning; and, can respond instantly to changing threats
•Work with HR and Legal to update employee guidelines to support acceptable Internet use policies and guidelines
•Train users on the hazards of indiscriminate use of social-networking and web sites
•Protect mobile laptop users.
What employees should do
•When using personal web mail accounts, do not click on links in your e-mail
•When visiting social networking sites, do not download applications without checking on the vendor
•Don’t download videos without proper security against spyware and viruses
•Don’t post your profile on a public social networking site if it identifies your employer and it can have a negative impact on the company’s reputation.
•Always be sure your antispyware and antivirus protection is up to date and that your personal data is protected using a secure online backup system.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products
Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products
12 September 2008
David Gootzit, Gene Phifer, Ray Valdes
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00160767
New entrants provide additional options for enterprises willing to consider open-source and software-as-a-service alternatives for horizontal portal functionality. To differentiate their offerings, horizontal portal vendors are incorporating support for enterprise mashups and social networking.
12 September 2008
David Gootzit, Gene Phifer, Ray Valdes
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00160767
New entrants provide additional options for enterprises willing to consider open-source and software-as-a-service alternatives for horizontal portal functionality. To differentiate their offerings, horizontal portal vendors are incorporating support for enterprise mashups and social networking.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint macht Enterprise 2.0 geschäftstüchtig
Microsoft SharePoint macht Enterprise 2.0 geschäftstüchtig
Microsoft liefert mit dem Office SharePoint Server 2007 in der Praxis bewährte Technologien für soziale Online-Netzwerke, Blogs, Wikis, Foto- und Video-Portale und andere Web-Dienste, die insbesondere von der Interaktion mit ihren Anwendern leben. Längst fragen sich immer mehr Unternehmen, wie sie Ideen und Anwendungen des Web 2.0 nutzen können, um ihre gesamten Informations- und Kommunikationsprozesse grundlegend zu modernisieren und zu verbessern. Genau diese Frage steht im Mittelpunkt des SharePointCommunityCamps 09.2008. Die Anwenderkonferenz findet in diesem Jahr am 15. und 16. September 2008 im NH-Hotel am Flughafen Stuttgart statt.
Microsoft liefert mit dem Office SharePoint Server 2007 in der Praxis bewährte Technologien für soziale Online-Netzwerke, Blogs, Wikis, Foto- und Video-Portale und andere Web-Dienste, die insbesondere von der Interaktion mit ihren Anwendern leben. Längst fragen sich immer mehr Unternehmen, wie sie Ideen und Anwendungen des Web 2.0 nutzen können, um ihre gesamten Informations- und Kommunikationsprozesse grundlegend zu modernisieren und zu verbessern. Genau diese Frage steht im Mittelpunkt des SharePointCommunityCamps 09.2008. Die Anwenderkonferenz findet in diesem Jahr am 15. und 16. September 2008 im NH-Hotel am Flughafen Stuttgart statt.
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