Datamation Staff

By Ed Sutherland I was watching an old “Laverne & Shirley” episode on cable the other night and realized I’d tuned into the future of third-generation (3G) wireless services. Almost daily there is a headline about a delay, glitch, or new report casting doubt on the future of high-speed always-on third-generation mobile networks slated to […]

By Eric Griffith and Bonny Georgia The Canadian province of Saskatchewan is a leading agricultural area, generating 54 percent of Canada’s wheat crop to the tune of just under $2 billion in annual revenues. But when things go wrong down on the farm — whether it’s drought, flood, insects, or just a low-yield season — […]

By Matt Cain Activity in the instant messaging (IM) space has never been more intense, with numerous story lines surrounding vendor activity. AOL’s reluctance to interoperate with other IM networks (such as Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger); wireless service providers banding together (such as Wired Village) to provide interoperability; companies like FaceTime using IM within […]

Certification Watch is provided by GoCertify.com, a gathering place and resource center for people interested in computer professional certification. 1. Microsoft to Incorporate XP, .NET into MCSE; MCSE Salaries Drop Windows XP and .NET exams are expected to be added to the MCSE track by the end of this year. Don’t be alarmed, though — […]

By Troy Dreier What if you threw an intranet and nobody came? That was the problem facing Jeffrey Henning, co-founder and chief operating officer for Perseus Development Corp. Perseus’s first attempt at an intranet, in 1998, was a failure, unused by the employees it was mean to serve. Built with the Cobalt Cube, the company’s […]

By Alex Kozlov Marketing Director, Compass America Internal IT organizations have a mandate to deliver quality products and services to their companies at a reasonable cost. However, relatively few internal organizations adopt the business-oriented viewpoint of an outsourcer. As a result, in-house IT shops are often perceived, rightly or wrongly, as less competitive and less […]

By Charlie Garry The art of high-availability (HA) planning — that is, keeping your IT system up and running as much as 99.999 percent of the time — is to balance potential business cost with the definite cost of insuring against system downtime. www.metagroup.com META Group research shows that most users’ time, money, and effort […]

By Joel B. Rothman In today’s technology-driven business environment, companies of all sizes are subject to risks that weren’t imaginable just five years ago. Every company today relies on the Internet. As a result, all companies are Internet companies. As businesses have become more dependent upon technology, the risks have increased exponentially. In most cases, […]

By Mike Espindle With over 30 retail locations in the greater Boston area and one of the largest dedicated floral inventory and shipping facilities in the country, KaBloom of Woburn, Mass., was well positioned to take its fresh-cut flower and gift delivery nationwide. But first its first-generation online store, developed in 1998, needed significant enhancements. […]

By Chuck Sykes Is there anything you won’t do for your customers? Certainly there is. The low cost air carrier Southwest Airlines, for example, won’t feed you or offer reserved seating, but at the same time they have the airline industry’s best cumulative customer satisfaction record. What are they doing right? They manage their customers’ […]