networking

Features

• In depth: Unified communications still fragmented

  Unified communications (UC) technology has garnered a fair amount of attention, much of it due to vendors touting their UC offerings as the answer to problems workers have keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners and customers in a highly frenetic, increasingly mobile business world.

• What enterprise mobile apps can learn from mobile games

  Enterprise mobile apps are shifting from small, narrowly task-oriented programs to larger, more complex ones. To design them well, enterprise developers can learn a lot from a surprising source: mobile games.

• From IT to ET: Cloud, consumerisation, and the next wave of IT transformation

  IT as we know it is over.

• BYOD battle: A tale of two opposing IT viewpoints

  EdSouth is a bank holding company active in the student-loan arena, and Arrow Container Corp. manufactures cartons and containers. Their ideas about letting employees use their own mobile devices at work for business — what's often called "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) — couldn't be more different.

• Hot for this quarter: The best smartphones

  Device manufacturers are starting to roll out some of their marquee smartphones in an effort to generate some buzz before Apple inevitably drops its newest iPhone this (northern) summer.

• Hold the phone: retailers eye payments via smartphone

  An emerging technology called Near Field Communication will soon give new meaning to the phrase "tapped out."

• Case study: Designing 'iPad WLANs' poses new, renewed challenges

  Complications that the influx of Apple iPads and iPhones bring to enterprise Wi-Fi networks and wireless LAN administrators are illustrated vividly at The Ottawa Hospital in Ontario.

• FAQ: What you need to know now about the 'new iPad'

  Yesterday, Apple pulled off the wraps from the new iPad -- yes, that's the official name -- and spent more than an hour on a San Francisco stage touting what's changed, like the screen, and what hasn't, like the price.

• Expert to IT pros: Adopt IPv6 soon or be sorry later

  A dozen of the world's largest Internet companies - including Facebook, Google and Comcast - have committed to June 6, as the start date for their production deployments of IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

• Technology argument 5: iPad vs. everything else

  We debated whether to call this piece "iPad vs. Motorola Xoom" or "iPad vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1" or whatever the Android tablet du jour is. But really it's still "iPad vs Everything Else."

• Want better Wi-Fi? Five things you need

  Laptops used to be the only devices on the company's wireless network. But Wi-Fi has become a ubiquitous standard used by a host of devices -- including desktop PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, printers, storage devices, and projectors.

• Car tech: The connected car arrives

  Automobile technology has become so advanced that today's cars are essentially computers with wheels. So why aren't we using them to surf the Web, communicate with other cars or order food at nearby restaurants?

• Gartner: The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012

  ORLANDO -- The technology that makes up many of the systems in the ITworld today is at a critical juncture and in the next five years everything from mobile devices and applications to servers and social networking will impact IT in ways companies need to prepare for now, Gartner Vice President David Cearley says.

• Patent madness! A timeline of the Android patent wars

  History may look at Android as the tech industry's Helen of Troy: The OS that launched a thousand suits.

• Chinese developers take a bite of the Apple

  If you've ever gone to Apple's mobile app store and purchased games like High Noon, Gamebox1 or Doodletruck, then you've downloaded an app from the burgeoning Chinese software development community.