management

An exceptional year for Alfresco

It's hard to talk about the rising success of open source without at least mentioning Alfresco, given the successes of this past year. Given that I work for Alfresco, I try to keep references to Alfresco isolated and only part of larger discussions of open source. But there has been so much momentum and traction lately that today I can't help myself. Indeed, CMSwire went so far as to write:

Every week, it seems, there's a big announcement from Alfresco....The [company] has...some kind of magical app-building framework which enables them to rattle off integrated products at lightning speed.

The latest of these [Red Hat + Alfresco collaboration] is not quite as sexy, on the face of it, as the Facebook hookup. But in terms of its implications for the collaboration portal industry, i.e. for Microsoft, it could prove to be the killer app which takes Alfresco into the big time.

In the last quarter alone, Alfresco racked up the following:

Alfresco registered 400% sales growth over an already very robust fiscal year 2006;… Read more

Redux in the identity management market

In the 1990s, implementing identity management was the IT equivalent of entering quicksand.

Projects took years, requiring process changes, custom integration, and organizational buy-in.

Many companies underestimated the time, cost, and effort to get identity right resulting in a number of highly publicized project failures.

Over time, enterprises developed a much more rational approach to identity management. Rather than take on yet another "boil the ocean" IT initiative, large organizations eschewed big projects in favor of a more piecemeal approach, implementing high-value products in areas such as user provisioning, Web access, or central management.

This buying behavior led … Read more

Salesforce to tout growth, charity at NYC event Wednesday

Enterprise Web software company Salesforce says it will be a holiday season worth celebrating: the company announced Wednesday that it is set to surpass a milestone of one million paid customers by the end of 2007.

"It took seven years to reach the first 500,000 paying subscribers and only another 16 months for the second 500,000," Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. "That's incredible global momentum and adoption for businesses of all sizes."

Benioff is set to be present at a New York press event on Wednesday afternoon that … Read more

Sun revamps its management with xVM Ops Center

We've seen a lot of changes in system vendors' management products over the past few years. One reason is that server management isn't just about hardware and operating systems any longer. It gets more important every day to be able to handle virtualized servers too. Sure, there are separate applications that specialize in managing virtual machines--VMware's Virtual Center, for example. However, today's (and, for the most part, tomorrow's) reality is that most organizations have a mix of physical and virtual servers that they'd like to manage in a common and consistent way, to the … Read more

Killer Download: Replacing Windows Explorer

Navigating your hard drive using Windows Explorer is pretty straightforward. Double-clicking a directory like My Documents brings up a list of items you have in that folder. You're given a couple of options for how you view the contents of a folder, such as arranging by date or by name. You also can view your documents using icons or tiles. The Windows Explorer window shares some of the features of Internet Explorer as well, like Favorites and toolbars. Clearly, this is nothing new to anyone who has used a Windows machine, and like many of you, I have my own ideas of how it could be made better.

We can probably agree that the options available with Explorer are adequate for navigating your hard drive, but a little more information and flexibility would go a long way. I found a few programs that add much more to file navigation, such as tabbed and paned directories for drag-and-drop file transfers and document previews so you know what you're opening before you open it. These Windows Explorer replacements offer tons of information about your files at a glance, like expanded properties and sorting capabilities not available with the default Windows setup. Some also feature much more intuitive methods for moving files around.… Read more

LogLogic hires software veteran as CEO

LogLogic, a software company with an open-source twist to the business of monitoring and analyzing server log files, has hired software industry veteran Pat Sueltz to be its new chief executive.

Sueltz has made the rounds in the software industry, working at IBM, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com, and most recently, SurfControl, which as CEO Sueltz sold to Websense for more than $400 million in April.

LogLogic sells proprietary software but also made an open-source move in 2006 with a component called Lasso, governed by version 2 of the General Public License (GPL).

LogLogic's acting CEO, Dominique Levin, now is … Read more

Process versus Process

It's hard to like the Windows Task Manager. It's clunky, makes drilling into computer's processes nigh impossible, and offers little help into what's going on. Like most native Windows tasks, though, there are freeware replacements available. Today we're looking at three of them: Process Explorer, Security Process Explorer, and Process Manager 2 Lite, all of which have recently received updates.

… Read more

Slow innovation -- long wow?

The Putting People First blog by Experientia has pointed me toward the excellent essay "The Long Wow" by Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer. Schauer outlines a vision of creating lasting customer loyalty and brand value that runs counter to the fixation on quick wins and instant gratification, which many companies, under the pressure of shorter product life cycles and CMO tenures, seem to pursue these days. He defines "The Long Wow" as "a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again."

This goes far beyond adding new features … Read more

Killer Download: Make space on your hard drive

When I bought a gaming PC for home use a little over a year ago, I bought a middle-of-the-road machine that had everything I needed with a little room to upgrade later on down the line. I got a 2.2GHz processor, a high-end (at the time) video card so I could play the latest games, 2 gigs of RAM (on the advice of a gamer friend), and I opted for a 120GB hard drive to save a little money.

At the time, it seemed like 120GB would be more than enough. After all, I can remember when a 1GB hard drive was the pinnacle of storage capacity--120GB ought to be able to hold anything right? Games these days generally take up a few gigs each so I thought I would never run out of space. I now know I was wrong. If you wait long enough, even the biggest hard drives will fill up.… Read more