Just picked this out on over ComputerWeekly.com
Wow - If that isn't a sore enough one for everyone involved in it... read down to see MS still able to recoup £50m from unlicensed software proliferation, and that is before they have been upset by an early contract cancellation.
Those EA true-ups don't half cost.
Project Liberate anyone?
Really interesting article by Robert McMillan on just how private your private online sessions happen to be. Well actually if you are paraniod it isn't perhaps even as bad as you might have thought but it isn't good. Without stealing Robert's thunder it would be fair to say that on average it is 94% bad (i.e., they can ID your browser - through some combo of browser, fonts, time zones, plug-ins etc... ) which would mean there is room for improvement...
I certainly would start applying some randomness to all those variables if I were some naughty Serbian or other sort about to embark on the cyber-naughtiness (I'm alluding to fraud rather than filth here). Move, counter, counter to the counter and so the game goes on: Cops and robbers... cops and robbers!
Anyway - check out Robert's article here.
At times reduced to a Barcode...
Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce
John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid
and
Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5
So there was a lot to see...
Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit). Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.
If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working. That is about 1% of a working day. So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101. With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010. So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment.... think you should be considering this stuff? I do.
For a £20k average salary
1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
For a £40k average salary
500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
or
1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.
Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right? Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.
Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone. Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.
Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles. Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified. If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine
Hi, I mentioned earlier that some fines were likely to come in to law - well they just have. So if you haven't got your house in order you probably should be thinking about it.
Whether you are governed by PCI, FSA or anything else this is the catchall - so make sure you are on top of it.
Oh, and it lok like a few guys
Zurich Insurance
(who lost 46,000 unencrypted records)
Royal London
just missed out on being the first big fine... good old post ex-facto... ;-(
Watch out all you data protection guys... call us if you need a hand...
Looks like the date is in for our next IPCCTV Event -Thursday May 06, 2010, 09:30-12:30
We've been working with Guys at King Communications to get the tweak the agenda for the intended audience. We've listened to the feedback from the last three events and think this one will be even better than the last.
The event will be held at the Dakota Hotel at Eurocentral will feature a number of in depth demonstrations of Milestone XProtect Corporate software and you will be able to see the systems running on IBM System X Servers and Storage.
XProtect 3.1 and Smart Client 5.0 Launch Webinar MIPS 2010 from Fredrik Wallberg on Vimeo.
The last event had over 60 attendees and we expect more this year. You can register on the Kings Event landing page here and if you want to let your network know what you are up to you can declare you are attending on linkedin.com by adding the event to your linkedin profile.#ipcctv #ipcctvscotland
IBM scooped the Best Security Company at Secure Computing 2010 Awards. Click these here links for a full list of finalists and winners. IMHO this is cos IBM has been going all aquisitive on us and snapped up, it would appear strategically (well done guys), all sorts of niche solutions over the past four or five years. Noteably for those of us at Seric Towers are of course Watchfire (2007) and Ounce Labs (2009) and we do see a fair bit of ISS (2006) out there in cyberville. Throw these bad boys into the already reasonably juicy mix and rub some GBS on it and IBM have a good story to tell those enterprise boys. Good enough to win the Security Company of the Year from SC at the largest awards in the Security Industry Calendar.
Here are some of the factoids about what IBM is doing to get just such an accolade
Why am I telling you this - well this would be the shameless plug section of the blog, we do this stuff! We supply and support the IBM's Rational AppScan Suite - covering black and whitebox application scanning. If you want secure code out there that won't leave you with egg (a fine) on your face (balance sheet) get in touch! Look, I even have a snazzy graphic for this stuff on my blog - yes, I spotted it should read PROTECTED
There are are 10 different siblings in the AppScan Family. You can compare the members of the AppScan clan here - though it is a particularly bad page as the row headings don't change with teh product changes and products look devoid of features when they are in fact irrelevant. Anyway - pick three and compare like-for-like, find what you like and then call us 0141 561 1161 - we'd like that ;-)
... but this look pretty interesting for folks going down the in house social software route... but perhaps looking to take it out to the network edge and (eventually) beyond.
The offering extends the functionality of Connections to include more of the Twitterlike ( @stuart-seric ) microblogging functionality. Here's a wee demo from Youtube land
There's a 30 day trial available and I can see this being useful for at least a decent subset of staff in an fully online business and a smaller proportion in others. No news/comments on whether mobile support will be offered or how this fits in on what Lotus are up to with RIM for Connections
I picked up from a fine article at finextra.com that Australia's Bendigo and Adelaide Bank have
launched an online social community where anyone with a plan, project or
idea can connect with other people to find support, resources and
expertise. This sort of community enterprise enablement through social media is the sort of thing that could really bring big changes to communities.
Users provide a description of their plan, the reason they are embarking on it and an explanation of what will constitute success. They can also post pictures, videos and documents.
Other visitors can then post comments, offering support, money, advice and information. They can also "get involved" by telling people about the plan through Facebook and Twitter, voting to support it and signing up for progress updates.
The bank says PlanBig draws on the strengths of social networking to enable people to efficiently share information, create partnerships and support each other's plans.
"One day we hope that PlanBig will be part of everyday life, a self-sustaining and self-moderating community that is of real use to passionate people and real benefit to communities with all kinds of plans, big or small," it says.
Themed collaborative platforms such as these will help to bring people together around a common purpose. Interesting to see banks getting involved in this space given older survey of facebookers have suggested they might be interested in taking up such things should vendors run with them. Good on the boys down under in getting this one out, looking to take a lead in their market space. Fortune favours the brave and this might just erm disrupt the apple cart.
ClearCase 7.1.1 and ClearQuest 7.1.1 introduce support for Microsoft Windows 7
You can get trial of this stuff to put onto your shiny new Win7 clients and start to test those vendor promises right away... Rational Clearcase Download Site
Unfamiliar with Rational ClearCase? Well there is plenty to learn, Rational ClearCase is a software tool for revision control (e.g. configuration management, SCM) of source code and other software development. Here's a screenshoot and details from IBM Support describing the explorer window.
The Rational® ClearCase® Explorer window consists of several panes and a toolbar.
By
default, all panes and the toolbar are displayed.
Under the view icon Rational ClearCase lists the view tag, which is the name by which you reference a view.
Move your mouse over the root directory to display the view tag and its associated path.
When you open the Rational ClearCase Explorer for the first time, with no view selected, or when you click the Getting Started tab in the Shortcut pane, the Details pane then displays a Getting Started Help topic.
The details pane is replaced by a browser pane when it displays information in a Web browser.
Ok so that was a bit of Brain dump... but I'm not guilty cos ClearCase is pretty decent and I like what you can do. That said I am generally more interested in the Rational stable based on the Jazz plaform which you can find out about at Jazz.net here is a description from draft 0.24 of the Detailed Architechture Overview of the site.
"The goal of the Jazz Integration Architecture (JIA) is to enable diverse tools to be used together providing an integrated experience to their users. This document provides an overview of JIA, and introduces the notion of a Jazz Team Server (JTS) that provides the Jazz Foundation Services (JFS) that allow groups of tools to work together. It also explains the relationship between JIA and Rational’s Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative."
The fulcrum provides flexible bridges ... simple, logical, functionally rich. Very nice.
More info on World of Rational sometime soon... S
Via Twitter came across @StuieSav 's blog on storage, info et al. Good geek postings and links on there but def this article stood out and struck a chord. Trying to get people to align IT with Business objectives is frustrating but so so so so so key to getting anything done. Why not check out Stu's coherent and succinct rant lyrical on the purchasing end of IT's perspective on this dielectric element of many IT conversations.
This may be the maddest product I've ever seen online... could this top e-bay's flux capacitor?
Check out the article in full
RRC is on the next increment of v2 and integration capabilities with RQM an RTC are greatly enhanced with the respective v2 released of each of this cheeky triumvirate of the jazz.net fold.
I'm about 2 weeks late with the news here.... afterall you could have been downloading this Good Stuff for almost a fortnight (that's the time you spent being posted to a fort -2weeks- in the olden days) and you can get it here.
Ah yes, they are all shiney and new on v2...
Oh, when industrial deisgn is good ... isn't it so very very good... well done Mr RCA man
Simple things and simple designs amuse this simple mind.
Described nicely thus by some doodle-dandy... "Of all the AC adapters stuffed into your personal item when globetrotting, the plug used in Merry Old England must surely be the most cumbersome -- its three copper prongs flung to the extremes of a giant block of plastic. That Victorian holdover gets a major re-do with this UK Folding Plug ..."
