Enterprise software

Computer security experts at France's Department of Defense have concluded that OpenOffice is more vulnerable to security problems than its closed-source counterpart, Microsoft Office, according to a report at ZDNet France.

The article, published earlier in July, said that cryptography experts were able to create viruses which compromised the security of OpenOffice.

"We can affirm that OpenOffice appears more dangerous than its commercial equivalent from Microsoft," a French Department of Defense researcher is quoted saying.

But he blames the vulnerability on OpenOffice's immaturity relative to Microsoft Office, rather than a fundamental architectural problem.

"One must … Read more

The former chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems may be the subject of criminal and civil charges to be announced by federal prosecutors on Thursday afternoon.

"We fully expect charges to be filed," said Richard Marmaro, an attorney for Gregory Reyes, Brocade's former CEO.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, FBI and U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco are holding a joint press conference at 2 p.m. PST to announce "developments" in their ongoing probe of stock option backdating.

While the announcement did not name any company, the file name of the Microsoft … Read more

By design or by accident, the idea of asking consumers to create ads and design products has already become an accepted practice. The phenomon's immediate adoption is even more remarkable considering that it has taken place in an ossified industry.

Just yesterday, for example, Yahoo launched a campaign urging the public to submit ads featuring its redesigned home page. Other companies have asked customers to design their own products, some of which are even being tracked on blogs dedicated specifically to the trend.

These initiatives typically tout the importance of companies creating new interactive relationships with their consumers in … Read more

In April, Google first publicly discussed Google Data API, or GData, which set off a round of discussion among an elite group of geek bloggers.

Now O'Reilly blogger Nathan Torkington has sparked some more discussion, following a recounting of his meeting with two of Google's well known engineers, Chris DiBona and Mark Lukovsky.

The idea behind GData is to provide a protocol for syndicating content, much the way ATOM and RSS do. One significant difference, though, is that GData allows people to query these Web feeds as well, according to Google's description.

Although it's very much … Read more

We at Blogma have an enduring appreciation for geeks and, like just about everyone else in the blogosphere, we love lists. So whenever possible, we try to combine our affections in some productive way: Hence, today's post entitled, "Top 10 Ways to Motivate Geeks."

Microsoft disclosed some details on a new development tool for hobbyists and non-professionals, part of an industry-wide effort to turn end users into developers.

In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft product manager John Montgomery discussed a prototype for a product coming from the Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT).

The idea of the product, code-named Tuscany, is to "take someone with no knowledge of code through to creating simple Web sites with HTML and Javascript or VBscript, teaching them along the way about things like methods, classes, events, properties, loops, and conditionals," Montgomery wrote.

The notion of empowering end … Read more

Dabble DB said that its namesake hosted database and spreadsheet is available to the public on Tuesday. It also said that Ventures West has financed its first round for an undisclosed sum.

According to the four-person, Vancouver-based company, Dabble DB is designed for quickly building intranet applications by combining a Web database and group spreadsheet.

Calling itself an "enterprise 2.0" company, Dabble DB is designed to be easy to use for end users, but suitable to be deployed at large and small businesses, according to the company.

The company has set up a tiered monthly pricing program … Read more

Open-source embedded database company db4objects said that Jerry Fiddler, the former CEO of embedded operating system company Wind River, has joined db4objects' board and invested in the company.

db4objects builds and provides support for db4o, an object database used primarily for embedded applications written with Java or Microsoft's .Net tools. The database is available under the GPL open-source license or a commercial license.

"db4objects represents an exciting new way to create an enterprise," Fiddler said in a statement, "efficient, sleek, and brilliantly leveraging modern technology and on-line community."

In addition to joining the board, Fiddler … Read more

ActiveGrid has released an update to its tool set which aims to bring LAMP development closer to Java.

With ActiveGrid Studio 2.0 and ActiveGrid Server 2.0, the company has made updates to the Jython project to have Python applications run on the Java virtual machine.

The reason ActiveGrid made contributions to the Jython project was to make ActiveGrid LAMP applications easier to deploy within companies, said CEO Peter Yared.

Rather than installing a new Linux server with the Apache Web server, MySQL and the Python runtime, customers can deploy a new ActiveGrid application on an existing Java application … Read more