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New Products

• April 1, 2005

The beta release of Panorama 4.5 now offers live updates allowing businesses to automatically push near real-time content to users, as well as allowing users to customize how they want the information presented to them. The business intelligence software's bubble-up exceptions are now featured inside a new ticker bar, and customers are now notified of a problem inside a scrolling ticker bar.

Panorama 4.5 supports matrix regions and 3-D charting for building production reports, as well as grouping and sorting for ad hoc queries. It now also supports both SQL Server 2000 and SQL 2005.

Panorama Software
Toronto
www.panoramasoftware.com

McAfee's Foundstone Professional Services unveiled a new security toolkit that would help developers validate, debug and analyze vulnerabilities when they're designing and developing Web applications.

The S3i (Secure Software Initiative) .NET security toolkit is comprised of the Validator.NET, the .NETMon and Secure-UML template tools. The Validator.NET allows developers to determine user input locations that are potentially vulnerable to hackers and offers proactive steps to build data validation routinely loaded into a protection module.

The .NETMon tool monitors the .NET common language runtime so developers can conduct detailed analysis of how the .NET framework enforces security controls, such as setting custom profiling filters and logging specific events. The SecureUML Visio template defines a custom Unified Modeling Language (UML) dialect to assist system architects in building roles-based access controls.

McAfee
Santa Clara, Calif.
www.mcafee.com

Salesforce.com introduced the Multiforce application environment, software that would allow Salesforce.com customers to multi-task between multiple on-demand applications in the same Salesforce.com environment with a single click.

Multiforce, which will be released in the summer, would enable companies to use the same data model, security system and user interface for any on-demand application built by customers or partners for the sforce platform.

Customforce, Salesforce.com's point-and-click customization tool, would help Multiforce make these changes. Customers would be able to create applications in minutes without any code.

Salesforce.com
San Francisco
www.salesforce.com

Rhapsody 6.0, which targets C language developers, now utilizes a new graphical engine that bolsters its design capacity with advanced formatting, ergonomics and drawing capabilities. It also features the Rhapsody Gateway, a requirements management component that offers a bi-directional interface with third-party requirements management tools, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

Using the Gateway, developers can link to the Rhapsody Model-Driven Development environment with original requirements, view and analyze coverage of those requirements, and examine the real-time impact of requirement changes at any level.

The I-Logix software allows developers to work in either a structure or object-oriented environment, enabling them to work with graphical files, functions and data in an environment where executing and debugging can be done at the design level. In addition, legacy and external C code can be imported in its original form and migrated to the Unified Modeling Language.

The platform now supports Japanese menus, dialogs and user messages, as well as loadable language resources. It supports the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF), providing a modeling environment to support the design, construction and analysis of DoDAF-compliant architectures.

I-Logix
Andover, Mass.
www.ilogix.com

Data Management

Symantec had added some enhancements to its LiveState Recovery Manager, a centralized, policy-based system and data protection management software for enterprise data centers, distributed computing environments and remote locations.

LiveState Recovery Manager 3.0 allows IT administrators to monitor backup status for an entire network, such as how many devices are enabled for recovery, how many are offline and how many jobs are scheduled and have missed scheduled jobs. Wizard can be used to define backup policies for groups of servers or users with similar requirements, which can then be deployed through a drag-and-drop interface. Problems can be resolved through centralized access to detailed storage information about each computer, such as volume name, size, amount used, last backup, last backup location, file system type and backup history and events.

As for backup features, the software can jumpstart backups on remote systems when they're not successful, deploy and configure backup services on remote system and remotely verify backup integrity for all servers and workstations.

Recovery Manager provides real-time monitoring and control for LiveState Recovery, Symantec's disk-based recovery software that allows enterprises to reduce backup windows and quickly perform complete bare metal restoration of critical systems.

Symantec
Cupertino, Calif.
www.symantec.com

Mindjet and Salesforce.com introduced MindManager Accelerator for Salesforce.com, software that allows sales teams to easily enter and analyze customer information and communicate account status with other team members, sales management and executives.

MindManager Accelerator extracts information from the Salesforce.com database and presents it as an interactive map dashboard, which will sit above Salesforce.com. The map enables sales professionals to edit, clarify, analyze and organize complex information into one visual, interactive view.

Mindjet's software will work with Salesforce.com's sforce-on-demand platform, allowing developers to customize CRM systems.

Mindjet
Larkspur, Calif.
www.mindjet.com

Salesforce.com
San Francisco
www.salesforce.com

Processes and Practices

Micromuse released two business service management (BSM) software products for real-time service visibility, allowing companies to automatically find business service infrastructure, build and maintain a service dependency model, and automatically configure agents for detailed application and system monitoring.

Real-time collection of business indicators, dependency, status and transaction information can be accessed from any data source, such as ERP and CRM systems, configuration management databases, element management systems and custom applications.

The BSM Availability software offers insight into the health and performance of key business and IT services, the customer experience and other indicators for improved service visibility. It includes transaction monitoring, service modeling, service impact analysis, real-time business and operational indicators, service tracking and reporting and event management.

The BSM Assurance software includes the same features as BSM Availability and features automatic discovery of service dependencies, automated service modeling and detailed application, and service infrastructure monitoring to identify and resolve problems faster.

Micromuse
San Francisco
www.micromuse.com

Tools and Technologies

Microsoft announced additions Office Communicator 2005 and Live Meeting 2005 to its communications product line and upgraded Live Communications Server 2005.

Office Communicator, which will be released by the summer, allows users to find, connect, communicate and collaborate in real time with colleagues, partners and customers, regardless of location. It also directs incoming communications based
on a user's presence and personal preferences. Users can move between communication modes such as IM, audio, video, Web conferencing, traditional telephony and conference calling.

Microsoft's other new release, Live Meeting, is a hosted Web conference service that helps information employees speak and work with anyone at any time. Features include the ability to launch a meeting from different Microsoft Office software, an audio conference-call control that calls participants directly to a meeting and allows presenters to mute and disconnect participants from MCI, BT and InterCall audio conferencing services. Live Meeting is now available in Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

Live Communications Server now offers Personal Internet Communicators (PICs) support that would allow companies to share security-enhanced IM information with customers, partners and suppliers on MSN, AOL and Yahoo! It also features support to prevent spam sent via instant messaging (spim), restricting IM and sharing information specified on each user's profile.

The server includes additional spim filter settings to cut down
on unauthorized or unsolicited messages.

Microsoft
Redmond, Wash.
www.microsoft.com

Vordel, an XML Web services security company, introduced new versions of VordelSecure, an XML gateway, and VordelDirector, XML security server products. VordelSecure provides a range of threat prevention and identity management filters to protect Web services. It sits as an inline intermediary, filtering XML traffic according to a set of configurable security rules.

VordelDirector delivers security services that can be called as part of a service-oriented architecture. These services include XML Signature, XML encryption, security token issuance and validation, logging and threat analysis.

Both VordelSecure and VordelDirector now include XPath Wizard, which simplifies the process for signing, encrypting and validating messages. XML Schema Editor enables administrators to apply security rules to be enforced over XML elements and attributes, controlling which elements are mandatory and which are not.

The editor also automatically generates XML Schema definitions from XML documents and SOAP messages. Vordel added more security for Web services by scanning HTTP query strings and HTTP headers for threatening content.

Vordel
Dublin, Ireland
www.vordel.com

ActiveBatch Version 5 is now available for businesses to help with job scheduling and managing. The upgraded software includes a job plan feature that would implement simple or compound job streams but reduce unnecessary operator and/or user interactions with the system.

It also offers job/plan variable support that would allow information to be retrieved by a job and/or passed between jobs. Information can be accessed from different sources, including SQL queries, XML files and registries.

The software from Advanced Systems Concept also allows jobs schedules to be executed by e-mail, FTP and other ways. Plan/job triggers now feature fiscal scheduling triggers and date arithmetic, as well as new series- and range-based exit triggers. ActiveBatch Version 5 supports job execution on many platforms, including Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT, Linux, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and HP-UX. It supports interoperability with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 databases and other compliant alternatives such as Oracle and Active Directory. The software offers optional Web server (Internet Explorer/Netscape) and wireless (Blackberry handheld) capability to control job scheduling tasks from nearly any access point.

Advanced Systems Concepts
Parsippany, NJ
www.advsyscon.com

IPControl 2.0, a new version of INS' IP management software, now features active subnet discovery and auditing, administrator authentication extensions such as authentication with Active Directory, enhanced device/IP address history and auditing and additional DNS enhancements such as mirroring and galaxies.

Companies would be able to automate their IP management processes by maintaining a centralized IP inventory, configuring DHCP and DNS servers and proactively monitoring and auditing IP address utilization through a Web interface. IPControl 2.0 manages IP address space, as well as tracking users and IP addresses for accountability. Its embedded discovery and data collection features allow auditing and inventory reconciliation of all IP addresses.

INS
Santa Clara, Calif.
www.ins.com