Outsourcing
Meta, 3/18/03: Winning the Outsourcing Contract Renewal Battle Service Management Strategies, Outsourcing & Service Provider Strategies
Wissam Raffoul
Outsourcing vendors should increase efficiency and elevate service quality to improve their chances of winning contract renewals. IT organizations should ensure new outsourcing contracts relate to and directly impact business performance.
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Meta, 3/19/03: Outsourcing: Help Desk or Service Desk Service Management Strategies, Outsourcing & Service Provider Strategies
Michele Hudnall
The IT service desk (help desk) continues to be targeted for outsourcing, as the provider market sustains interest by hyping “nearshore” and offshore delivery options. To improve service and reduce staffing costs, best-practice organizations will assess sourcing opportunities, by defining service objectives and aligning delivery strategies.
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IT Management
Meta, 3/18/03: Benchmarking: Clarifying Cost Versus Price Confusion Service Management Strategies, Outsourcing & Service Provider Strategies
Dean Davison, Douglas Plotkin
As pressure increases on IT organizations to perform and become cost-effective, the use of benchmarking is growing. Confusion quickly ensues over varying types of benchmarks and the differing methodologies advocated. Market results increasingly validate that price benchmarking is the only effective tool for outsourcing analysis.
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Security
Giga, 4/7/03: Authorization Management Is a Challenge for All Enterprises
Henry Peyret
Contributing Analysts: Jonathan Penn, Randy Heffner
Do provisioning and consuming authorization rights already represent a challenge for enterprises?
Provisioning and consuming authorization rights do currently represent a challenge for enterprises — and a big threat if companies do not want the costs of manual authorization to explode in the future. Authorization management is the discipline of defining roles, naming people to roles and then enforcing the policies that apply to them. Businesses must think carefully about how to provide authorization management capabilities. And before deploying technology to solve authorization management, Giga recommends identifying manual processes allowing users to provision authorization rights themselves before trying to automate them.
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Mobile
Computerworld, 4/14/03: Competition in switch-based WLAN market to grow
By BOB BREWIN
Extreme Networks Inc. and Trapeze Networks Inc. today introduced switch-based enterprise wireless LAN products to get a jump in a market that analysts expect to get crowded this month. They said another five vendors will launch similar products between now and the start of the Networld+Interop conference in Las Vegas on April 27.
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Microsoft
Press Release, 4/14/03: Arrival of Windows Server 2003 Heralds New Era for Software Security
REDMOND, Wash., April 14, 2003 -- For countless people and businesses around the world, the Internet is a dream come true, but at times that dream has nearly become a nightmare. Along with the benefits of instant global communication and increased connectivity, new security risks have emerged on a scale that few anticipated or could have imagined. As people everywhere increase their reliance on the Internet to help them communicate and conduct business, the need for a secure computing platform becomes more apparent and more critical each day.
Windows Server 2003, which Microsoft will make generally available on April 24, will set a new security standard for server operating systems. Windows Server 2003 is the first operating system released by Microsoft since the company's chairman and chief software architect, Bill Gates, challenged all 50,000 Microsoft employees in January 2002 to build more Trustworthy Computing products and services for customers that would make computing as worry free as the electricity that powers their homes and offices.
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TechWeb, 4/15/03: Office 2003: The Last Thing The Enterprise Needs
By Scot Finnie
It's ironic, really. Microsoft was at the forefront of the microcomputer revolution, which was about giving individuals full-time access to a computer's power. Now the company is trying to find a business model in applications that require software services, or Web services, or any service that requires Microsoft servers and server-based applications. While Microsoft has been working on pieces of this strategy for some time, Office "System" 2003 is the first full-fledged end-user product based on it.
There's nothing wrong with the concept; extending a standard that makes it easy should be part of the Microsoft Office team's job description. Internet- and LAN-based services can punch up applications by providing, for example, customized data access and collaborative capabilities.
But very little has changed in terms of what most enterprise users currently need from a suite of mainstream business applications. While small segments of some companies focus on collaborative activities, most businesses still use Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook pretty much as they did last year and the year before that.
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The Wall Street Journal, 4/15/03: Microsoft Center Breeds New Software Technologies
By MARK BOSLET
REDMOND, Wash. -- Talking computers, video e-mail, and business presentations that download automatically to every laptop in a meeting room may sound like the future.
But they are on display now at Microsoft Corp.'s Center for Information Work, a seven-month-old demonstration lab on the company's sprawling campus here. The center is a breeding ground for technologies the software giant hopes will help remake products, such as Office.
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Economy
Fast Company, 5/03: The New Normal
From Boom to Bust to War to Whatever Comes Next. Superstar investor Roger McNamee defines the new era of business and finance and shows where the smart money is headed. Here's what you need to know about investing, competing, and winning today -- and for the rest of your life.
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