IT Management
Computerworld, 12/15/03: Union urges IBM workers to fight plan to move jobs offshore
Company reportedly plans to move 4,730 jobs to India, China and other countries
Story by Patrick Thibodeau
The labor union representing a small but growing number of IBM employees is considering taking action against the company's reported plan to move nearly 5,000 jobs offshore, including asking employees to refuse to train their replacement workers
"We are working with our members to organize to fight this anyway we can," said Linda Guyer, president of Alliance@IBM, an Endicott, N.Y.-based union of roughly 6,000 IBM workers (up by more than 1,000 members since this past spring). "We think it's not only unfair to the employees; it's unfair to the U.S. economy."
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eWeek, 12/16/03: Dell Pushes Management Standards
Dell Inc. this week joined with other vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Intel Corp., to create a working group within the Distributed Management Task Force that will help create standard server management software interfaces. The group will evolve the DsssssMTF's Common Information Model—or CIM—specification that will enable customers to manage their heterogeneous environments using software from any vendor. The group also will address various architectures, including blade servers and virtual environments. Neil Hand, director of worldwide product marketing for Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, spoke with eWEEK Senior Editor Jeffrey Burt about the need for more standardization of management software.
Dell has said that standards in management software are very important to the company going forward. Can you talk about this?
They're important to us because in the end we've heard very succinctly from our customers and many of our prospective customers that it's one of the fundamentals that they need to manage their business, and the fundamental is being able to use servers and storage. But in the end, we think that we as an industry have done a pretty poor job of delivering against that customer fundamental.
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Computerworld, 12/15/03: Windows Installer
by Robert L. Mitchell
QuickStudy: Windows Installer is a Windows service that allows applications to be installed cleanly and consistently and tracks the use of system resources to minimize conflicts.
No more DLL hell. That was just one of Microsoft Corp.'s goals when it introduced the Windows Installer service along with Windows 2000 nearly four years ago. The service, which now runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and earlier versions of Windows by way of service packs, was designed to provide much-needed consistency to the Windows application installation process.
Before Windows Installer was available, software developers created their own automated installation scripts or used third-party authoring tools to create an installation program. Each followed different rules, had a limited ability to keep track of files also in use by other applications and had no ability at all to track shared use of nonfile resources such Windows registry keys.
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c|net, 12/16/03: Where did my IT job go?
By William V. Grebenik , President, Pantha Solutions
This has happened before in the United States. Steel, automobiles, textiles, chemicals--entire industries have gone global. Some of you will never work in IT again.
Some recovered, and some have not. Honda makes cars in Ohio, Nissan in Tennessee and BMW in South Carolina. Some argued that American labor was too high. The competitiveness of U.S. industry, in addition to labor being cheaper and more flexible, brought some jobs back.
Costs will force us to equilibrium. For now, jobs are being sucked to the lowest-cost labor pool. Quality, experience, flexibility and project communications have been pushed back by the overriding concern of cost savings.
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Hewlett Packard
Gartner, 12/12/03: Hewlett-Packard Business Continuity and Availability Services
Summary
HP’s client-centric approach to business continuity solutions for local and global multiplatform and HP environments ranges from single elements to comprehensive solutions.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) Business Continuity and Availability Services offer a broad range of availability and continuity services for the environment and applications of both HP and non-HP customers, including business continuity, high-availability and security services, within a consulting relationship that begins with comprehensive analysis and planning. Building up the understanding of each client’s possible business consequences due to an interruption in processing, HP offers four broad categories of solution options, each focused on one type of customer requirement scenario (as indicated in the table “HP’s Customer Requirement Scenarios”).
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Microsoft
Giga, 12/10/03: Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Solution Has Potential, but Won’t Tilt the Services Automation Market
Margo Visitacion
Is Microsoft Project 2003 a viable enterprise product?
Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution (EPMS) continues the evolution of Project from a pure desktop scheduler to a full-fledged enterprise project management tool. While the product will carve a definite niche for midsize companies (100 to 500 employees), it will not overtake the services automation market addressing large corporations’ needs. The individual pieces of EPMS are strong: The product has improved functions required for moving into the enterprise market such as collaboration, document management and resource allocation. Microsoft provided needed usability fixes, transferred more functionality to the server for browser access and increased reporting depth. All of these discrete changes are positive, yet Microsoft has not yet succeeded in delivering a completely integrated EPMS solution.
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Collaborative Technologies
Infoworld, 12/16/03: Social networking targets the enterprise
Emerging method of relationship management poised for corporate success
By Ephraim Schwartz
Corporate social networking software measures, reads, and evaluates e-mails, instant messages, and calendar entries, capturing the names of message authors while protecting the content. The names are then exposed to algorithms that search, weight, and rank others in the database for possible contacts within the company a user is trying to reach.
Startups offering both point solutions and solutions that are part of a greater CRM suite include Contact Network, Interface Software, Spoke Software, and ZeroDegrees.
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