IT Management
Meta, 9/4/02: Microsoft Management Strategy: Part 1 —Monitoring
Corey Ferengul
Microsoft Windows is growing as a server platform, and so are the options and complexities of managing it. Microsoft offers many options and has various plans for managing its platforms and applications, which need to be understood by any organization with a Windows server environment.
The Windows platform is growing rapidly as a server operating system. With the number of Windows servers increasing, organizations have found themselves in need of a management plan to support the environment. Current organizational practices —which consist of mostly manual effort for deployment, maintenance, patch application, and administration, combined with some monitoring (most via the Windows performance registry and not a third-party tool)—will not suffice.
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Meta, 9/18/02: Microsoft Management Strategy: Part 2 — Server Administration
Corey Ferengul
Microsoft Windows is growing as a server platform and so are management options and complexities. Microsoft’s current and future management options — specifically, those surrounding server
administration as well as change and configuration management — must be understood by any organization with a Windows server environment.
The Windows platform is growing rapidly as a server operating system. Currently, most server management efforts are scattered at best and focus on monitoring the platform and applications (see SMS Delta 1116), leaving administration functions to manual efforts. As server populations increase, manual tasks such as server deployment, patch administration, configuration management, and administration of the devices (e.g., server parameters, altering user configurations) must be automated or else risk a significant rise in support costs. Microsoft is poised to address these management needs through the newly announced Server Management project.
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Giga, 9/20/02: Giga's July 2002 CIO IT Spending Survey: Midtier Customers Show Confidence
Lisa Pierce
Giga’s most recent chief information officer (CIO)-level aggregate IT spending survey indicates that for the midtier of enterprises, spending intentions are more positive than they were the last time the survey was administered. Generally speaking, spending is holding steady; cuts are no longer the norm, and reductions that had recently been made or will be made are reported to be of modest. Furthermore, compared to 2001, more participants reported year-to-date spending increases than decreases; the same is true of planned spending through the end of the year.
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Information Week, 9/23/02: Keep 'Em Happy
Having an IT staff that understands the business and its customers' needs is one key to improving customer satisfaction
By Eric Chabrow
Booby Cude, a manager of interactive marketing at Southwest Airlines Co., recently drove 20 minutes from his digs at Dallas' Love Field to a nondescript office building in the suburb of Grant Prairie, where the airline maintains a reservation center. Amid the hum of computers and under the glare of fluorescent lights, nearly 200 agents field some 1,000 calls an hour. Cude made the trip with his team of four Internet developers as homework for upcoming enhancements to Southwest's Web site. Upon arrival, each developer plugged a headset into a reservation agent's phone and spent the day monitoring customer calls.
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Microsoft
ZDNet, 9/23/02: Why .NET will conquer the world
By John Carroll
COMMENTARY--.NET clearly bears a strong resemblance to Java. It offers many of the same features, while adding interesting additions of its own (code metadata, versioned assemblies, etc). Microsoft, however, is better positioned to create a cross-market software unification framework than Sun Microsystems ever was (or is). This will result in a rapid expansion in .NET's popularity which eats into Java's market share as it grows to take over the development world.
There are a number of reasons for this…
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ZDNet, 8/19/02: Windows XP--one year later
By Larry Seltzer
I've been using Windows XP as my main desktop OS for about a year now. I'm really very happy with it, as are most XP users I know. It's probably the best job Microsoft has ever done on a desktop operating system.
However, there are some things that could have been done better. One year later--especially now that Service Pack 1 has been released--it's worth looking at what Microsoft could have done better, though I don't think any of the flaws are crucial.
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Remote Access
IDG, 9/20/02: Vulnerabilities uncovered in Cisco VPN client software
Paul Roberts, IDG News ServiceBoston Bureau
New vulnerabilities discovered in the Cisco Virtual Private Network (VPN) 5000 Client software could allow an attacker to gain root access to a local workstation running the VPN client software or to capture password information used by the client, according to statements released by security company Ubizen NV and by Cisco Systems, Inc. Thursday.
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