Long-Term, Cellphones Will Have Built-In Messaging & Collaboration Clients

Today, very few people access email on their cellphones. And for those that do, there’s often a choice of client software you can use. It’s too much effort to download and configure this software. As a mass market emerges for cellphone-based email, most people will use software built into the phone, provided by vendors such […]... read more »

Good Example of Calendaring Interoperability

I was working with my email the other day, using my favorite email and calendar product, and I received an email invitation to a meeting. When I opened the email, my application "recognized" it as a calendar invite, and gave me the opportunity to accept, decline, delegate or recommend another date.  Sounds simple, right? Except […]... read more »

Teamspaces Workspace Clients Must be Web Browsers

Early teamspace products often had rich clients. But it’s clear that’s wrong. They must be web browsers. You want to be able to set up teamspaces at will. Often, you’ll want to do this with people that aren’t members of your organization. You won’t be able to make many assumptions about the workstations they’re using. […]... read more »

New McAfee Secure Messaging Service Advances Email Protection for Small to Large Businesses, Powered by Postini, Inc.

McAfee released McAfee Secure Messaging Service for Small Businesses and McAfee Secure Messaging Service for Enterprises, its email threat prevention and policy management solutions formerly entitled McAfee Managed Mail Protection. Key features: based on Postini Perimeter Manager, provides email protection against spam, phishing, viruses, inappropriate content, denial of service attacks and directory harvest attacks, and […]... read more »

Scanning for HTTP and Instant Messaging Malware Very Similar to Scanning for Email Malware–But Not Quite

There’s a growing convergence between scanning for email malware, and scanning for web and instant messaging malware. Eg, you need to scan both for virus-infected file transfers, spyware downloads, and traffic that has inappropriate content. Clearly, a lot of the technology that applies to the one channel, should apply to the other channel. And you’d […]... read more »

Trend Micro Delivers Housecall Server Edition for ISPs and Enterprise E-commerce

Trend Micro released version 6.1 of Trend Micro Housecall Server Edition, its online threat detection and removal software. Key enhancements: detection and removal of spyware and adware, security scan feature to identify missing security patches and other vulnerabilities, and a re-designed user interface, among others. Available immediately.... read more »

Content Analysis, Not Action, is the Difficult Part of Policy/Regulations Compliance

There are a growing number of products that scan electronic communications (especially email), to enforce compliance with laws, industry regulations, or organization policy. The first one to get well established was MIMEsweeper. Other more recent players include MessageGate, ProofPoint, Tumbleweed, and Vontu. Vendors always talk breezily about the policy definition. However, the really difficult thing […]... read more »

McAfee, Inc. Now Offers Extended Platform Support for Macintosh Users

McAfee announced support in McAfee Virex for Macintosh, its anti-virus solution, for the Mac OS X 10.4 operating system. Available August 2005.... read more »

Why Directories are a Niche Technology

Directories were once viewed as a potentially general-purpose IT building block. In practice, they have never been used in this way. There are a variety of reasons for this. Directory vendors didn’t make directories either available or easily usable for this purpose. For example, Microsoft’s Active Directory until relatively recently (see Active Directory Application Mode […]... read more »

Analysts: Google’s Talk Move May Shake the Market

eWeek: Click Here for Story... read more »

Live Website Chat Cheaper Than Phone, Email

It’s cheaper to provide live chat on your website than phone and email support. The average cost of a chat is around $1.50/chat. It’s about $2.50 for an email, and $6 to $8 for a phone call. Live chats are cheaper because: On average an operator can respond to 5 chats at a time. With […]... read more »

ScanSafe’s Hosted Content Filtering Service for Web–Interesting

We recently came across ScanSafe (https://www.scansafe.net/scansafe/index.html). This is a hosted service that scans web traffic for malware. The main services are: Virus control Content filtering. Eg, allows administrators to limit access to gambling and porno websites Spyware detection and control It’s the first such hosted service we’ve come across. Hosted email malware services (eg, MessageLabs, […]... read more »

Oracle 10G Collaboration Suite Finding Its Niche

Article discussing the upcoming release of the 10g version of Oracle Collaboration Suite which includes new content management capabilities, IM, voice capabilities, wireless push e-mail for mobile phones, wireless calendar synchronization and a new web-based e-mail client.... read more »

Microsoft’s Hosted Messaging Gathers Momentum–But Telco Customers Will Have Mixed Success

Microsoft’s Hosted Messaging & Collabration Solution is gathering momentum. Early customers include AT&T Global, BT, and France Telecom. HMC is software that lets a service provider offer a hosted version of Exchange, Live Communications Server, and Windows SharePoint Portal Server. The good news for Microsoft is that presumeably many big name telcos will sign up. […]... read more »

Symantec to Acquire Sygate Technologies

Symantec announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Sygate Technologies, a provider of endpoint compliance solutions.... read more »

EMC to Acquire Rainfinity

EMC announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rainfinity, a provider of virtualization solutions for heterogeneous networked attached storage and file system environments. The acquisition, valued at less than $100 million, is expected to be completed by the end of August 2005.... read more »

Quest Software Enhances Archive Manager for Exchange

Quest Software released version 2.0 of Quest Archive Manager for Exchange. Key enhancements: compliance filtering, single-instance storage, and discovery based on specific criteria, among others. Available immediately.... read more »

EMC’s eRoom is a Rich, Relatively Mature Teamspace Environment

EMC recently updated us on its teamspace product, eRoom. The main features it provides are: Shared folders Project planner Shared calendar Version control and checkin/checkout Integrated web conferencing Integration with email for alerts, notifications All clients run a browser Optional Windows browser plug-in, providing thingslike drag and drop What struck us is that this is […]... read more »

McAfee, Inc.’s 2006 Consumer Security Software Product Line Now Available to Subscribers

McAfee released the 2006 versions of its consumer security software, McAfee VirusScan, McAfee Personal Firewall Plus, McAfee AntiSpyware, McAfee SpamKiller, McAfee Privacy Service, and McAfee QuickClean. Key enhancements: anti-phishing browser plug-in for McAfee SpamKiller, automatic spyware detection for McAfee VirusScan, Automated, and daily signature updates McAfee VirusScan and McAfee AntiSpyware, among others. Available immediately.... read more »

Teaming With Big Integrators an Excellent Strategy for Small Vendors

Early stages vendors have a problem when selling to large organizations. The latter naturally, and reasonably, have an aversion to working with small firms with unpredictable futures. Working with large integrators, such as IBM Global Services or Logica/CMG, can be a good way to get around this. The integrator takes responsibility for delivering the customer […]... read more »

Google SMS–Limited Business Value Now, Future Bodes Well

Google SMS (https://www.google.com/sms/) lets you send short text questions on your mobile phone. You can do things like request stock quotes, or find a local hospital or restaurant, or look up a dictionary definition. For the moment, this won’t be used a lot by business people: In North America, business people aren’t used to SMS […]... read more »

EMC Announces Significant Enhancements to Enterprise Collaborative Environment

EMC announced version 7.3 of Documentum Enterprise eRoom, its team communication and management solution. Key enhancements: new dashboard capabilities, IM integration, and enhanced content server integration, among others. Available immediately.... read more »

New GroupWise Comes With SuSE Linux

eWeek: Click Here for Story... read more »

Virtual Meetings Have Productivity Advantage Due to Greater Resilience

Collaborative technology is making it easier and easier for people to work together, when they’re not physically in the same place. Sometimes, it’s necessary to have virtual meetings, because team members are geographically distributed. But it turns out that even…... read more »

Hummingbird Reports Third Quarter FY2005 Financial and Operating Results

Hummingbird released results for 3Q2005, ended June 30. Revenue increased 10% to $61.7 million with a GAAP net loss of $1.9 million.... read more »

iUpload’s Interesting Business Use of Blogs

iUpload sells hosted blog services. Some customers are doing very interesting things with the firm’s Community Publisher (https://www.iupload.com/products/communities/index.asp).This is sold to businesses. They use it to create a community of bloggers, and these can generate very valuable content for the…... read more »

PIM/Messaging is the Driver for Business Mobile Handhelds, Not Applications

A wirelessly-connected handheld device has two major business benefits, that stand out: It can connect to the office messaging system. So you can keep current with emails, new calendar events, and so on It can provide access to production systems,…... read more »

Stellent Reports Record Quarterly Revenues Of $28.6 Million

Stellent released results for 1Q2006, ended June 30, 2005. Revenue increased 26% to $28.6 million with a GAAP net income of $1.1 million.... read more »

Open Text Introduces Content Archiving for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

Open Text announced Open Text’s Livelink ECM – Document Archiving for Microsoft SharePoint, its content archiving solution for Microsoft SharePoint. Key features: archive documents from SharePoint, archive content on a variety of secure storage media, and rule-based archiving, among others.... read more »

Mimosa Systems Releases Disaster Recovery Solution for Microsoft Exchange

Mimosa Systems released NearPoint Disaster Recovery Option, its Exchange Server data management solution. Supports Double-Take, offering NearPoint users local and remote recovery of Exchange and NearPoint data in the event of a disaster. Available immediately.... read more »

Symantec First to Offer Email Security and Availability Solution

Symantec announced Symantec Email Security and Availability. Key features: anti-spam, anti-virus, and archiving, among others. Available immediately.... read more »

Opening PandoraÂ’’s inbox

Economist.com: Click Here for Story... read more »

H.323 Development Dying/Dead (2005)

H.323 is a series of protocols that provide audio-visual communication sessions on any packet network. It is currently implemented by various Internet real-time applications such as NetMeeting. SIP is the main challenger. It is still early days, but if SIP…... read more »

Appliance Guards Web Mail, FTP

Article discussing Proofpoint Network Content Sentry, an add-on appliance to its Content Security suite, which monitors Web mail, message boards, blogs and FTP-based communications.... read more »

Spam Quarantines Do Damage

You may have heard us predict the death of email spam before. Briefly, the argument goes like this: as more people’s mailboxes are protected by anti-spam filters, and as those filters get more accurate, fewer spam messages get delivered, so…... read more »