software

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.

• Study: Facebook relies on good design to retain users

  What is Facebook's secret to keeping the world's largest user base content? Sticking to well-proven software design principles, one study has concluded.

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  Analysis: Why Linux is a desktop flop

  It's free, easier to use than ever, IT staffers know it and love it, and it has fewer viruses and Trojans than Windows.

• Open for business: It's the year of the corporate app store

  With more employees using smartphones and tablets for business, enterprises are setting up their own app stores for application distribution, leveraging a consumer model for mobile application access that is tuned to the workplace. Instead of saddling already overburdened IT personnel with getting applications to individual devices, these app stores provide a central distribution mechanism for employees to download applications themselves.

• The big promise of big data

  For Twitter, making sense of its mountains of user data was big enough of a problem that it purchased another company just to help get the job done.

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  Mobile apps: The IT pro's new power tools

  Think the mobile revolution is all about word games and social networking apps? Think again. Heavy-duty apps for IT pros have arrived on mobile platforms and they're quickly changing the face of IT systems management.

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  A deep dive into Windows 8 Consumer Preview

  Windows 8 Consumer Preview is one of the biggest changes that Microsoft has made to Windows, moving it from an operating system aimed at a single class of hardware (PCs and laptops) to one that spans a wide range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

• Windows 8: What you need to get started

  Early yesterday, Microsoft shipped the Consumer Preview for Windows 8, the drastically different refresh of the venerable operating system.

• FAQ: What's what in OS X Mountain Lion?

  Last week, Apple took most Mac users by surprise when it released a developers preview of Mountain Lion, the company's newest desktop operating system, and announced it would ship the upgrade later this year.

• OS X Mountain Lion: A big cat for business?

  Apple surprised the tech world by unveiling a developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, the next generation of its desktop operating system set to ship this summer - just a year after OS X 10.7 Lion arrived.

• In depth: Hands on with Apple's new OS X, Mountain Lion

  Apple updates its iOS mobile operating system once a year. But why should the iPhone and iPad have all the fun? Apple has announced that it will release a new version of OS X—Mountain Lion—this summer, just a year after the release of OS X Lion.

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  20 popular Ubuntu Linux apps you may want to try

  As Ubuntu Linux continues to grow in popularity, most discussions of it tend to focus on the basics of the operating system itself, including especially details about its desktop environment and user interface.

• Analysis: Will this be the year of Apple in the enterprise?

  Apple has never been considered an enterprise technology company, but it owns a significant share of the mobile enterprise market, largely due to the success of the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air.

• Dig deep into Lion: The best overlooked, underrated features

  Apple billed this summer's release of Mac OS X Lion as having more than 200 new features, but most coverage of Lion in the intervening months has focused on only a handful of them. While iOS-like navigation and app-launching interfaces, autosave/restore capabilities, AirDrop file sharing and an emergency restore partition are by all means important, there are a lot of helpful tweaks and enhancements that can easily be missed.

• Want Siri on your Android phone? Try these apps

  Wouldn't you like to have your very own gofer dedicated to doing all the menial tasks you hate? That's a big part of the appeal of the iPhone 4S: Siri, the voice-driven virtual assistant, turns anyone with a couple hundred bucks into a CEO attended by a full-time lackey. But can you get the same kind of slavish devotion from an Android phone?