Stories about: INS

Bruce Marcus, the executive vice president and CIO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, answers questions about moving into leadership positions, dealing with a difficult boss and the impact of the economy on IT.

Whether you're writing a report, editing home movies and posting them to YouTube, or managing complex spreadsheets, you want to do it as quickly and easily as possible. But because we all develop our own habits for using a computer -- maybe somebody showed us how to do things a certain way or we've figured them out on our own through trial and error -- we don't always work in the most efficient or organized manner.

Rich Internet application vendor Curl will announce Tuesday that it has completed its initial transition over to the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) with a set of Eclipse plug-ins, Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE).

A recent study of Web browser installations showed that far too few are up to date with the latest security patches. And browsers aren't alone; as my dear old mum can attest, it can be hard to keep up with OS and application patches when all you want to do is use your computer for work. It should come as no surprise that many PCs are vulnerable to security exploits that could otherwise be prevented.

Recently, Microsoft released its second release candidate build, RC1, of Windows Essential Business Server, or EBS, a midmarket server solution for businesses with 50 to 300 users and computers.

The latest browsers are fighting back against the never-ending assault from online crooks who want to sneak malware infections through your browser and onto your PC. Opera 9.5, and, soon, Internet Explorer 8 add new security features that block known malware sites.

Security software customers are speaking with their feet: They want security updates and other security interruptions out of their faces, and they won't hesitate to dump their security suites because of performance drag -- whether or not it's actually the security software that's to blame.

Zimbra has long been one of my favorite open source products. I remember getting a first demo of Zimbra from CEO Satish Dharmaraj at the Red Hat conference about three years ago, while they were still in stealth mode. Satish, Scott Dietzen and the rest of the crew weren't setting out to build a me-too mail client. They were attacking a much larger problem.

Ubuntu Linux Founder Mark Shuttleworth urged development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple has done in this space and aired a vision of software changing the world.

VPNs are well established as essential tools for corporate communications, but they are not all created equal. Here are six questions and their answers that can help you make decisions about which VPN technology to use.

Last week I began to discuss a remarkable virtual-appliance-based system for network monitoring and management called Groundwork Monitor Community Edition.