Stories about: Centric Software

Queensland State Archives (QSA), custodian of the state's largest collection of public records, is set to commence stage two of its world-class catalogue software system.

In one of its biggest update days in memory, Apple late Wednesday patched 41 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, rolled out the long-anticipated (and likely last) update for Tiger, quashed 10 bugs in the Windows version of Safari and upgraded a slew of other applications.

While Eclipse tools may have first appeared in some companies after grass-roots efforts by individual developers working on isolated projects, the open-source developer community is now squarely "business-oriented," according to the results of a recent survey released Tuesday.

While Todd Sharp is driving down the highway between Charlotte and Atlanta, a new sales order triggers a lookup for the customer phone number and salesperson (that would be Todd) assigned to it. The system then polls Siemens OpenScape UC (unified communications) software and checks Todd's presence status, discovering that he's working remotely and available only on his cell. OpenScape kicks off a VoIP call to Todd's cell phone and, using a text-to-speech engine, reads the sales order over the phone. It then prompts Todd to press 1 to autodial the customer. Minutes after the order arrived, Todd is thanking the customer from his car.

A leaked memo from Bill Gates to top Microsoft executives says that the company is facing its biggest challenge in the current "services wave" - online services such as those developed by the likes of Google and Research In Motion.

An ad-hoc delivery of essential project modules, causing conflict between certain modules and necessitating "build in" at different stages, turned a simple ERP upgrade into an "exhausting process" for renewable energy company Hydro Tasmania.

Microsoft's decision not to bundle the Java virtual machine (JVM) in the forthcoming Windows XP operating system will be little more than a nuisance for corporate users, analysts said. But the decision, announced Wednesday, may deter developers from picking Java as their Web language of choice.

Microsoft Corp. will not include its JVM (Java Virtual Machine) in Windows XP or subsequent operating systems as part of a phaseout of the JVM following a January out-of-court settlement with Sun Microsystems Inc.

Location-based services developer Xmarc Inc. in San Jose has announced that this month it will release enhancements to its Wireless Internet & Infrastructure Software Environment (WIISE) 2.0.

Few can deny that the ultimate dream of the application service providers (ASPs) is enticing: Imagine users accessing any of their applications and data whenever, wherever. At the same time, one of the most tedious tasks facing any IT department--installing and supporting applications and managing users' data--disappears. Eager to test this promise, some companies have already started using ASPs in areas such as customer relationship management and supply-chain management. Now a handful of developers have their sights set on applying the ASP model to personal productivity tools--word processors, spreadsheets, presentation packages and the like.

A Microsoft Corp. official, ending an unusually dour earnings call late last week, predicted lower future growth and blamed it partly on soft sales of corporate PCs. That set off a chorus of concerns about the impact it would have on the stock market, which reopens today for the first time since Thursday.