1/28/2008
Virtualization pioneer VMware has released the public beta of its new deployment management product, VMware Stage Manager. The application is based on the company's flagship virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure 3.
1/25/2008
IBM announced Tuesday the acquisition of Burlington, MA-based AptSoft Corp., a privately held business event processing software provider. The acquisition enhances IBM's current business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, according to Ed Lynch, product manager and transition executive for IBM's business integration portfolio.
1/25/2008
While Microsoft's record revenues of $16.4 billion and earnings of $4.7 billion for the second quarter put the spotlight on strong sales of Vista and Office, Redmond's latest financial report also showed steady growth in its server and tools business.
1/25/2008
Despite public confidence that SQL Server 2008 would ship by the end of June, Microsoft today indicated it probably is more likely to arrive toward the end of the year.
1/17/2008
Oracle Corp. and BEA Systems announced Wednesday that they have completed a deal whereby Oracle will acquire BEA for $7.2 billion, or $19.375 per share. Oracle originally offered to buy BEA in October for $6.7 billion, or $17 per share. BEA countered with a $21 per share price. Now that the companies have found a middle ground, the acquisition is going forward. With BEA's cash on hand, the total deal is worth $8.5 billion, the companies said.
1/17/2008
Database administrators using Oracle Database products haven't been applying Critical Patch Updates, according to survey results described by Sentrigo Inc., which is in the business of providing database security software. Oracle typically releases its Critical Patch Updates on a quarterly basis, but these patches apparently are too much of a hassle to apply.
1/16/2008
Sun Microsystems is making a play to boost its standing in the $15 billion database market. The company announced Wednesday a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, whose technologies are behind some of the highest-volume sites on the Web, including Google and Facebook. The deal will cost Sun about $1 billion, but the company said it expects the move to "[reaffirm] Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor."
1/16/2008
The folksonomy phenomenon is a response to the overwhelming volume of information on the Web. How did we end up with such a daunting super-abundance of information? And how will we cope? Here are a few approaches...
1/10/2008
First-year enrollment at the University of Alabama is up 40 percent, at least in part because the school is using a sophisticated data analysis product to gauge which students to target in enrollment and retention campaigns.
1/9/2008
Sandy Schaeffer makes a call for higher education technology decision-makers to put pressure on the LMS vendor community to begin to un-bundle their products... with particular emphasis on greater flexibility in terms of content management.
1/2/2008
Intel Corp. released a new software product suite that is designed to enhance the performance of XML in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, or other environments where XML handling needs optimization. Intel XML Software Suite 1.0, which was announced last month, provides libraries to help accelerate XSLT, XPath, XML schemas and XML parsing.
1/2/2008
Adobe Systems is planning to release the source code for the remoting and messaging technologies within its LiveCycle Data Services suite as a separately branded product called BlazeDS. A beta of the product is available now on the Adobe Labs developer portal.
12/13/2007
Prosoft Engineering has brought full support for Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") to its backup and recovery system, Data Backup 3. The software remains unchanged otherwise.
12/10/2007
Microsoft has begun a full rollout of the private beta of its Live Office Workspace. OLW, unveiled earlier this year, is a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that allows for collaboration and sharing of documents. The technologies included in OLW have already been rolled into Microsoft's Live@edu, a portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education.
12/7/2007
Microsoft Wednesday continued its hand in hand development of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista's first service pack, publishing release candidates (RC) for each product. The big updates in Windows 2008 RC1 revolve around enhancements to Group Policy, a management framework first introduced in Windows 2000 Server. Group Policy Preferences, as it has been renamed, was formerly known as PolicyMaker Standard Edition and Policy Share Manager.
12/6/2007
FileMaker has released interim updates for its FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced database solutions. The new versions sport expanded compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") and for the software's Web publishing features.
12/4/2007
Jenzabar this week released an update to its Jenzabar EX enterprise resource planning solution. The new 2.7 update, which shipped Monday, adds "significant" enhancements to two of the suite's modules, according to the company, and incorporates various other improvements throughout.
11/29/2007
Telelogic has improved components of its overall "enterprise lifecycle management" software product suite, which combines model-driven development with application lifecycle management.
11/26/2007
San Francisco-based GoldenGate Software is offering a new version of its database optimization solution. Version 9.5 adds improvements to the company's Transactional Data Management solution. It's typically used by enterprises that want high-availability data or disaster assurance protection. The solution also lets users move data across different databases in real time, according to company literature.
11/19/2007
The nonprofit OASIS standards group has created a technical committee in support of the Service Data Objects (SDO) specification at OASIS. The SDO spec, which is a subset of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) spec, aims at simplifying data handling in service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
11/9/2007
Education technology developer Blackboard has partnered with Sony to deliver support for Sony's smart card technology in its Blackboard Commerce Suite for use with campus ID cards.
11/7/2007
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (also known as Virginia Tech) is enhancing its Web presence in an effort to improve communications, offer new services, and provide autonomy to schools and departments at the university to create and reuse content. For the Web upgrade, Virginia Tech is deploying Percussion Software's Rhythmyx Web Content Management system.
11/2/2007
Yes, COBOL. Believe it or not, in higher education, COBOL--one of the oldest programming languages and second only to FORTRAN in comedic value--still has a future. According to a survey of CIOs by technology provider Micro Focus, more than 75 percent said they intend to recruit COBOL programmers over the next five years, but 73 percent said they're having a hard time finding such programmers. COBOL was invented in 1959 as an alternative to the most popular programming language of the day, Cuneiform.
11/1/2007
An Independent Oracle User's Group (IOUG) survey found that business deployment of open source solutions (OSS) was not extensive relative to proprietary solutions. The survey was based on 226 responses from the IOUG membership.
10/26/2007
Microsoft has rolled its Office Live Workspace technology into Live@edu, the company's portal, communications, and collaboration suite for higher education. According to Microsoft, this is but the first in a "new wave" of Office Live services making its way into the higher ed space. The Live@edu service itself has also been upgraded to provide greater storage capacity and additional features.