Stories about: Extensibility

IBM has upgraded its high-end enterprise search product with an improved user interface, and will announce next week the availability of a business intelligence tool that can be used with it to analyze call center data.

If you've watched "The Lord of the Rings" or many other visual effects-driven Hollywood films, you have seen Massive Software's 3-D animation software at work.

In the second part of Computerworld's analysis of the Office Open XML debate, platform strategy manager for Microsoft, Sarah Bond, and several Microsoft gold partners offer their views on why the OOXML format should become an internationally approved standard.

For the first time, Cisco has assembled all of its software assets -- IOS, Unified Communications, Collaboration and Network Management -- under a single organization. The Software Group was formed to coordinate product development and inject a common set of services across all of Cisco's software. Senior Vice President Don Proctor took some time at this week's C-Scape analyst conference to talk with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy about Cisco's software plan.

Sun used strong-arm tactics and made threats to the owners of an open-source directory project to wrestle away control, according to one of the former owners and creators of the project.

Since the dawn of the business network, there has been a need to ensure that the network services provided to the enterprise are alive and responsive. Traditionally, in midsized businesses, this role has been filled by complex, closed source, and fantastically expensive solutions from manufacturers such as BMC, CA, HP, and IBM. And while these extravagant expenses make no customer happy, many users of these packages also complain of their complexity. Enough administrators have spent enough time wrangling with their monitoring systems to make a lot of smart people imagine that there must be a better way.

SOAP is the currency of the SOA marketplace -- for now, anyway. Though SOAP's significance may diminish as Web services evolve, its importance for the time being is unquestionable. Therefore, a substantial portion of the QA work by Web service providers and consumers must entail verifying the accurate exchange of SOAP messages. Not surprisingly, several SOAP-focused Web service testing tools have appeared.

Microsoft will today release three non-security updates to Windows Vista that relate to battery life, sleep/hibernation issues, and glitches in the Media Center version.

Google's much-hyped entrance into the office tool market dominated by Microsoft doesn't seem to have worried CEO Steve Ballmer, who dismissed competitors as not "even as good as 'me too'" in an interview Wednesday.

When last surveying open source Web CMSes (content management systems) I provided some common-sense advice. For example, it's important to look for not just functionality but also frequent updates, a healthy user community, and the availability of professional support. Some points are still true today, but new offerings may get you rethinking the role of these products in your enterprise.

Two years in the making, IBM's Lotus division has finally unveiled version 8 of Lotus Notes and Domino.