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IT Productivity, ITSM, IT Job Descriptions, Sarbanes Oxley, IT Salary Survey, and Disaster Planning News Portal

Good business continuity planning needs to take a broad view, embracing people, human behavior, customers and other factors that lie outside the data center. It is also important to secure the vision and endorsement of executive management. A properly funded, well-prioritized business continuity plan, combined with a regular program of testing and recovery drills, will help to safeguard the organization. Read this white paper to understand the key elements of a successful business continuity plan, see how to develop a plan that clarifies what is critical, and set specific recovery requirements.

Recession or not? That is irrelevant to you. You need a plan based on facts, not frightening words. Start collecting them.

• Know your CEO. Does your CEO trust you enough to be candid? If so, talk to him. Otherwise, do some research. How has this executive reacted in the past to a tighter business environment by shrinking or by attacking competitors?
• Know your business. Real estate is getting ugly, but discount retail may benefit. Some banks are overextended; others see opportunity. Merrill Lynch's Rosenberg predicts consumer discretionary spending, financials and tech will be pummeled badly; telecom, health care and utilities have the least downside risk. How hard will your companys customers be hit?
• Know your supply chain. Who is solid? Who is shaky? Who is likely to cut back on the ability to work with your IT initiatives? And downstream, which big customers are likely to make demands on your IT capabilities?
• Know your IT shop. You have a portfolio of projects. Which ones are bogged down? Which have lost meaningful support from their business sponsors? Where will you redeploy those analysts and developers?

Because they free users from the need to be cabled to a physical network, wireless LANs are being used as an access vehicle to help businesses better collaborate. Wireless LANs can improve business process efficiencies, provide scalability, improve infrastructure costs, contribute to customer and employee satisfaction, and help resolve business continuity issues. When considering a wireless LAN implementation, users should address security, bandwidth, roaming, and interference issues. more info

(Computerworld) Google Inc. has created a real-time viewer that allows users to watch as other users around the world make changes to locations on the maps, the company announced Thursday.

Google began allowing its users to edit locations on Google Maps in November as part of an effort to ensure that homes and businesses are marked in the correct location. While Google restricted access to some listings like hospitals, government buildings and businesses whose listings have been sited through Google's Local Business center, other users could move arrows marking locations. Some edits like moving a marker more than 200 yards from its original location requires a moderator's approval before they show up on Google.

The new viewer lets users "just sit back and watch the world's information improving bit by bit, edit by edit," Charles Spirakis, software engineer at Google Maps, said in a blog post.  "I warn you, though, it's highly addictive (almost as addictive as helping make the improvements yourself!)."

Adam Ostrow, a blogger at Mashable, wrote that Google Maps is evolving to become Google's best homegrown social product.

"Although more of a 'that's cool' feature than something incredibly useful, the visualization does highlight the growing importance of social features in Google Maps," Ostrow wrote in a blog post. "They've also recently released collaborative maps, community maps, and in Google Earth, you can now see geo-tagged YouTube videos."

Ostrow said that Google's efforts to ramp up Google Maps seem to be paying off, citing a Hitwise report last week showing that Google is quickly narrowing the gap between its traffic and that of MapQuest. While 426% more users visited MapQuest than Google Maps in 2006, the lead was cut significantly last year as MapQuest pulled in only 126% more traffic than Google Maps.

With the explosion of technology into every facet of the day-to-day business environment there is a need to define an effective infrastructure to support operating environment; have a strategy for the deployment and technology; and clearly define responsibilities and accountabilities for the use and application of technology.

Applications, operating systems, storage, networks and databases need to support high reliability and availability. IT managers need a view across all components of the application infrastructure to maintain service quality. Legacy systems must be brought forward and enabled for XML, Web services and other new technology. Tools crossing middleware, EAI, message brokers, applications servers and database gateways must be combined to meet today’s requirements.

The list of natural and manmade disasters with which businesses have had to contend early in the 21st century is long. Many organizations have felt the devastating effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks, acts of bioterrorism involving anthrax, and bombings in London, Madrid and Bali. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina also have had costly, far-reaching impacts on businesses.

Disruptions resulting from these and other disasters have rippled across supply chains, shaken entire industries and taken their toll on employee, customer and partner relations. Not surprisingly, organizations of all types and sizes are making crisis preparedness and response a key focus of their business continuity planning. Chances are, your organization is taking a proactive approach and continually looking at ways to minimize the impact that potential crises can have on your business processes and technology systems. Yet, even though your company’s business continuity plan most likely serves to protect your company’s physical assets, such as its data, network(s), core business applications and facilities, how well does it address the human side of disasters?

On December 28, 2007 AOL announced that it stopped development of the Netscape browser, saying the respected brand that launched the commercial Internet in 1994 had little chance of ever regaining market share against its archrival Microsoft. AOL spent $4.2 BILLION dollars in 1994 to

Eventhough Microsoft owns the OS market in the commercial marketplace, the market share of Vista is still only a little over 9% after one year.  Currently almost 95% of all systems that browse the internet are some form of the Windows OS. 

In is Browser and OS Market Share study, which is to be release on January 3rd, Janco found that most users are not really interested in the OS.  Rather they are interested in the way that they can use the systems to meet their needs.

Janco found they are basically two types of Vista users:

Email today presents a serious risk to security, business productivity, and compliance with government and industry regulations. As the use of email for legitimate business purposes continues to trend upward, so does its use as a tool for unwanted, illegitimate, and occasionally dangerous, business activity. There are three predominant sources of risk that every organization faces: spam, information leakage, and compliance as it relates to email.

Spam currently ranks as the third-greatest threat to enterprise security. Professional spammers continue to clog up to 90 percent of unprotected mail stores and inboxes with unwanted emails that soak up bandwidth, upset end users with irritating or offensive content, and negatively impact employee productivity.
more info

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is creating a lot of buzz across the IT industry. Propelled by standards-based technologies like XML, Web Services, and SOAP, SOA is quickly moving from pilot projects to mainstream applications critical to business operations. One of the key standards accelerating the adoption of SOA is Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for Web Services. more info

Back in April 2006, Microsoft made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages.

This was frustrating to users of IE and did not really offer any addition security that was not already in place.

Some sites required users to click to activate before they could interact with the control.

Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing  the click to activate requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, Microsoft is removing the click to activate behavior from Internet Explorer!

It is important to note that this change will require no modifications to existing webpages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages.

Microsoft is reverting to the old behavior. Once Internet Explorer is updated, all pages that currently require click to activate will no longer require the control to be activated. They will all just work.  

Best Places for Business and Careers

(Forbes) The news on the economy in recent months has been uninspiring. The subprime lending mess threatens to accelerate the housing slowdown. Gas prices are at their highest in eight months. Gross domestic product growth this year is expected to be less than 3% for the first time since 2003. But one part of the country consistently manages to produce strong economic growth and still keep costs down. For the second straight year the Southeast placed 5 metros in the Top 10 of our Best Places for Business and Careers. While most economies in the West have also outperformed their peers in the Northeast and Midwest over the past four years, living costs there have risen dramatically. Housing prices in Phoenix, spurred in part by easy lending, are up 57% in the past two years, knocking it off our Top 10.

The overall rank for the best places to live according to Forbes is: