Stories about: IT People

All over Beijing, Olympic countdown clocks tick off the seconds that China has awaited for seven years: the moments until Aug. 8, 2008, at 8:00 pm, when the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics begin.

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22 per cent annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

CRM software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have made the big leap, claims Forrester Research in a recent report. SaaS CRM offerings "have moved beyond their previous status as a specialized deployment option and into the mainstream," write Forrester analysts William Band and Peter Marston in the May 2008 "Best Practices: The Smart Way To Implement CRM" report. Band and Marston identify five critical strategies that have enabled companies to capitalize on SaaS.

Similar to its famous "developers, developers, developers" rant, Microsoft is chanting "software, software, software" as it lays the cornerstones of its unified communications platform.

Open source icon Stormy Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters recently discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open source software is more secure than proprietary code.

Network security can be a thorny issue for small businesses because they generally lack pricey equipment and dedicated IT people who have the expertise to lock down a local area network. But addressing security is nevertheless essential: Just one customer data breach could easily wipe out a small business, and constantly battling viruses, spyware, and spam can sap employee productivity.

When Gordon Moore made his prediction in a 1965 issue of Electronic Magazine (download PDF) that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year (eventually updated by Moore to two years and then updated again by Intel to 18 months), it was just a "lucky guess" based on a few points of data, he recalled in an interview in 2006. But the idea, which has grown to encompass ever cheaper, ever smaller, ever more powerful components, has so captivated the IT industry that you can't attend a technology conference without seeing at least one PowerPoint presentation displaying the Moore's Law graph.

I have had endless discussions with all sorts of non-IT people about how to build their Web sites and it almost always ends with them giving up. The problem is that there are so many parts to building even a basic site, and what most of them want is the all singing, all dancing Web site with every advanced feature included and zero management overhead.

Web-based e-mail is booming. Services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are convenient, accessible and, best of all, free. Many of us have come to rely on them without giving it a second thought.

Although some would trace back the roots of software as a service to mainframe timesharing, what we would now call SaaS, or on-demand computing, is really experiencing its second coming.

By taking common-sense steps, you can reduce the chances of career suicide