Jacqueline Emigh

For managing its upcoming Windows 2003 Server, Microsoft plans to release System Center, a suite that will combine Systems Management Server (SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM). Several years from now, though, SMS and MOM will both be history. As Microsoft adopts a new “self-healing” architecture, administration and monitoring tools will instead gradually be integrated […]

Anti-spam solutions are gaining visibility these days as big name vendors start to make more of a splash. Trend Micro issued an anti-spam announcement this month and Computer Associates (CA), Symantec, and Network Associates are expected to follow in the near future with announcements of their own. Most commercial products actually on the market, though, […]

Beyond a big maintenance release in February and two later upgrades, IBM is planning a new release of Lotus Domino/Notes for 2004 that will act as a migration path to the NextGen architecture based on WebSphere and DB2. Meanwhile, the first two products in the NextGen family — a lightweight e-mail system and a learning […]

“Enterprise wireless” isn’t synonymous with simple 802.11 wireless LANs any more. Government agencies and research institutes are now starting to deploy broadband wireless networks for unplanned outages and disaster recovery. Meanwhile, big financial brokerage houses are doing reams of instant messaging (IM) over the RIM paging network. At a conference held by the Wall Street […]

A lot of corporate portals still seem stalled at the pilot stage, but others have swept into full production. According to people working on projects at IBM, Microsoft and elsewhere, portal development can carry implications for just about everyone in a company, including network managers. If a portal does open up near you, how will […]

Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) first hit the market about a year ago. Administrators, though, are still addled with questions. How does Microsoft’s new MOM network management system (NMS) interplay with NetIQ, UNIX management, and Microsoft’s own Systems Management Server (SMS), for instance? MOM, SMS and other Microsoft management products carry “ominous implications for the NSM […]

Formal security policies are less commonplace in enterprise environments than many people might think. Why are some organizations still dragging their feet, and what might help give security administrators a boost? In a worldwide study of more than 1,000 IT executives last year, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) discovered that 46 percent do not have a […]

To fend off physical and man-made disasters, network administrators need to act ahead. Emerging technologies for business continuity include VPNs (virtual private networks), SANs (storage area networks), VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), and satellite links. From the 9/11 disaster, companies have learned some hard lessons about the need for technological and geographic redundancies, speakers said […]

During the current era of corporate budget-crunching, many businesses are moving to server consolidation as a way of cutting total cost of ownership (TCO). In some situations, server consolidation is going hand-in-hand with standardization on a small number of vendors for hardware and/or OS purchases. For network administrators, this lessens the need to keep up […]

With wireless LANs cropping up on company grounds, network managers need to batten down the 802.11 hatches. That means setting the stage for wireless policies, to be implemented now as well as in the future. Many experts think that wireless policies should start with a logical separation between the wired enterprise network and 802.11 links. […]