Columns

Where’s Your E-mail?

• By Michael Alexander
• August 1, 2005

Not long ago, a Florida jury awarded tycoon Ron Perelman $1.45 billion in damages in a dispute with Morgan Stanley, the investment firm. The case shifted decidedly in Perelman’s favor after MS was unable to produce crucial e-mails ordered by the judge. With publicity from big-money cases such as this one and several corporate governance mandates, you would think e-mail management would be high on IT’s list of things to take care of, but it’s not. In this issue, Alan Radding takes a look at the difficulty of e-mail search and retrieval and the ways some companies are tackling the problem well before attorneys get on their case.

Evolving business demands and ever-more capable technology are conspiring to rewrite the once-straightforward definitions that used to describe data warehousing, writes Alan Earls in his look at on-demand data warehousing. On-demand is one of a number of related terms that describes a faster-better variant of yesterday’s typical data warehouse. What’s driving it is the trend toward harnessing BI applications and analysis tools to tactical, day-to-day decisions.

Regular readers of ADT are probably familiar with Stephen Swoyer’s writing. He’s invariably entertaining and informative, which is not always easy to do when you write about such things as embedded application development, as he does in this month’s issue. Thanks to the emergence of mobile and wireless devices, the existence of lite versions of cutting-edge frameworks such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition and .NET, and the availability of versions of Linux and Windows designed specifically for embedded applications, it’s a Brave New World, according to Swoyer.

“This new worldscape has some technology visionaries talking up a scenario in which the once-discrete practices of embedded and enterprise application development meld, or at the least, commingle,” Swoyer writes.

Finally, Steve Ulfelder takes a look at information lifecycle management, which he found is finally getting traction, mainly because enterprises must adhere to compliance regulations. ILM is no longer just vendor hype, Ulfelder discovered.