Instant messaging, the sometime consumer-driven technology for sending and receiving text messages in real time, now rivals e-mail in its rate of adoption among business users. For some organizations, IM has become a cornerstone communications technology. Companies that once complained about the IM assault on the corporate networks now encourage their employees to use it to interact with customers, partners and suppliers. “I could give up my phone before my Blackberry,” a San Francisco exec told AppTrends.
Microsoft and Research In Motion have announced an agreement to provide enterprise instant messaging and presence to BlackBerry subscribers based on Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Phoenix Contact, a worldwide leader in the manufacturing of industrial automation, interconnection and interface solutions, needed an enterprise solution to keep its sales force up to date with its headquarters without a lot of additional work. The Lotus Notes r5 shop, with U.S. headquarters in Harrisburg, Pa., had equipped its sales force with laptops where each had its own local database. But that local database had to be synchronized and replicated to a central database.
How does a company coordinate information about its products stored in disparate applications in different locations throughout the enterprise? One increasingly common answer is to deploy a product information management (PIM) solution. Not to be confused with that other PIM (personal information managers), these products provide a means of integrating and centrally managing scattered product data. They can also be used to link and sync product-related info internally with existing enterprise systems and externally with business partners.
Healthcare provider Beverly Enterprises faced an interesting challenge when it decided to streamline its processes and create user-friendly interfaces to 20-year-old legacy mainframe data.
The IT group of Virginia’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has reduced to almost nothing the time its developers spend creating various end-user XML reports. Instead, users create their own reports in Microsoft Word, using a product from Windward Studios.
In order to achieve better applications quality, companies will have to implement a standard, centralized testing methodology and skilled staffers, according to a recent survey commissioned by Compuware and conducted by Forrester Research.
Many IT shops are looking to service-oriented architectures as a way to build a unified, standards-based framework that would enable disparate systems to seamlessly interoperate. To do that requires an SOA governance architecture or framework, which manages the services and policies of the SOA and gives IT visibility into the SOA’s inner workings.
What if you could outsource to a company that offered the cost savings of an India-based outsourcing firm, but whose facilities were just a few hours away?
As companies gradually add more and more Web services to their networks, one growing challenge will be discovering, managing and troubleshooting those services.
The Liberty Alliance, the non-profit trade group organized to develop open standards and tools for federated network identity, this week published new interface specifications for three identity-based Web services: presence, geo-location and “contact book.”
Development tools for parallel computer systems tend to be architecture-specific, difficult to integrate and fairly basic. Parallel application developers often find themselves juggling tools to match the different machines, shifting gears from stark command-line interfaces and text editors to a range of graphical user interfaces.
The latest results of an international Battle of the Brains programming contest could spell bad news for the U.S. tech industry.
As the RFID market begins to inch beyond the early-adopter stage, companies are noticing that the swarm of tiny devices unleashed in their warehouses is generating valuable data that should be integrated and managed with the rest of their enterprise info.
The eBay Developers Conference will be held June 21-22 at the Fairmont San Jose Hotel, followed by eBay Live! June 23-25. eBay plans to introduce a unified API schema that will support software development across all platforms and languages. The schema, called eBay Web Services, supports development in XML, SOAP, .NET and Java, as well as eBay’s software development kits for Java and Windows.
The software industry is obsessed with commoditization, has been since the crash. Commodities pose a fundamental threat to the long-term profitability and revenue growth of traditional software vendors. It’s something to be feared, a fate worse than death—or at least equal to it.
It’s April 12, and do you know where your Windows XP systems stand? The mechanism to temporarily disable delivery of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) expires today. Microsoft allowed temporary disablement through Windows Update and automatic updates for a period of eight months, starting August 16, 2004, to give customers more time for validation and testing of the update. But now, time’s up.
If one of your considerations in planning a .NET or J2EE project is finding developers with the right skill set, your location may be a factor.
Application Development Trends is launching three new blogs this month! Two of the three blogs--AppSide and Enterprise Insider--will be written by Java programming experts.
Microsoft hopes to lure more developers into the .NET camp with a free Java to .NET Framework Migration Workshop. The workshop features online, self-paced training designed to introduce Java developers to .NET development concepts based on using their Java skills as a frame of reference.