Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent...

One of the most powerful IT case studies I have read recently was the Microsoft one for their own in-house `Salesforce 2.0′ platform, what they call Infopedia. As detailed in the full white paper on this topic of Cloud 2.0, when it is applied to the sales activities of an organiz...

With cloud adoption becoming a de-facto option for small and medium enterprises, large enterprises are relatively slower in their adoption of cloud. The main reason is that large enterprises have a very complex existing IT setup and no single offering from various cloud providers has y...

In our previous article, SQL Server 2008 Overview, we looked over the different features that the Microsoft SQL Server provides. In this article we will focus on the new and advanced features of the latest SQL Server release – SQL Server 2012. They include, but are not limited to, the ...

RPost is enabling Outlook developers to extend their apps with email tracking, legal proof, encryption, and e-signatures. These additions will ensure that users stay legally compliant with HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley. RPost's Outlook application is now offered package...

It's frustrating that business users will often articulate about IT and the enterprise technology architect, but more frequently in an environment where one of the major ERP vendor products like SAP or Oracle Business Suite have been invested in. I am talking about the general disregar...

Please hold your skepticism, keep an open mind, go through the following points and only then pass a judgment on my prediction that “three years down Windows Phone would have overtaken Android." The UI is different but very well designed for mobile and tablet. The same view is express...

Yes, I’m back (finally) with another in my series of expanded-answers to questions I have received during TechNet Events and IT Camps I’ve facilitated. But for these next blog posts I’m going to have a little fun by actually showing you the written question. Great question. Windows...

Has the world changed more between now (2012) and 1962 that is the last 50 years or the 50 years prior to that (1962-1912)? Wait a minute! What does this have to do with “Consumerization of IT”? Believe me, there is a connection – just hold your skepticism – humor me – and read on! ...

The primary function of the Internet Information Server (IIS) is to host Web based applications, such as ASP.NET. If you have to set your IIS 7 to host such an application, there are several terms you need to know and a procedure you have to follow. We will focus on them in this articl...

In our last article we discussed best practices when using asynchronous calls. In this article we’ll look at guidelines for Locking and Synchronization. Locking and synchronization provide a mechanism to grant exclusive access to data or code in order to avoid concurrent execution. Det...

In our last article we discussed guidelines for optimizing Threading. In this article we’ll look at best practices for using asynchronous calls. Asynchronous calls are non-blocking meaning when you call a method asynchronously, the calling thread returns immediately and continues execu...

As evident from various social media interactions, blogs, tech news sites and other Google searches, the two events that clearly brought the attention of every one happened in quick succession. Interestingly there are huge discussions about the issue of ‘Windows 8 vs iPad 3,' while th...

The CLR exposes managed threads, which are different from the Win32 threads. The logical thread is the managed version of a thread, while the Win32 thread is the physical thread that actually executes code. If you create a managed thread object and then do not start it by calling its S...

Does Knowledge = Power? At first glance the answer seems to be obvious – yes knowledge is power. After all we live in the knowledge economy. Most of us are knowledge workers. We have graduated from the industrial age to the information age. Knowledge is considered as the key asset of a...

Five of the top six services critical to cloud are application delivery services and available with F5 BIG-IP.

Apr. 21, 2012 10:45 AM EDT  Reads: 1,257

BNZ tried earlier to get their BI act together with SAS, SAP and even SQL Server 2008 R2 but there were excessive delays in getting BI views from their huge data. With SQL Server 2012 and the PowerView feature, it appears they can now provide 80 Views every week. This is a great thing ...

We saw it all before: the portal gold rush, the microsite gold rush, the Social Media gold rush. They all ended at one point and gave way to a more mature way of utilizing these new tools and tactics. In the early days, we saw a few lucky pioneers strike gold with novelty apps. There w...

This is good news for Microsoft, not that it needs any more cloud respectability than it already has, but it is important for both companies. By this latest agreement, Accenture will become the first global technology services provider for the Azure platform. The agreement also covers ...

Faced with a need to find huge cost reductions the Province of Ontario is in the same place as many governments throughout the world – They’ve shouldered the debt to see us through the financial meltdown and now need to be smart about how they digest what they’ve taken on. They’re als...

There are many books on Cloud Computing in the market today. Most of them focus on the technical aspects of dealing with designing, developing and deploying applications on various Cloud Computing platforms. The target audience of these books happens to be developers or IT professional...

While cloud computing has brought to the forefront of our attention the ability to scale through duplication, i.e., horizontal scaling or “scale out” strategies, this strategy tends to run into challenges the deeper into the application architecture you go. Working well at the web and ...

One of the most fun aspects of hosting The Cloudcast (.net) podcast is that we take a completely vendor-neutral and technology-neutral stance on what we discuss and who we invite onto the show. Lots of learning and lots of great discussions. And occasionally we ask a few questions and ...

Visual PaaS (meta-data PaaS) is purpose built for developing business applications like Order Management, CRM, Dealer Management Systems, Claims Processing - type applications. In such applications, the success of the project is determined by the strength of the "data model" created by...

Remember the Liberty Alliance? Microsoft Passport? How about the spate of employee provisioning vendors snatched up by big names like Oracle, IBM, and CA? That was nearly ten years ago. That’s when everyone was talking about “Making ID Management Manageable” and leveraging automation...

Among the new crop of NoSQL database products, MongoDB ranks quite high, in my opinion. The company that produces MongoDB is 10Gen, a venture backed new start-up since 2008. But its rapid growth over last 4 years bears testimony to its technical strength. MongoDB’s name comes from the...

SystemAdmins were generally the early embracers and end users of VMware ESX as they immediately recognized the benefits of virtualization. Having been bogged down with the pains of running physical servers such as downtime for maintenance, patching and upgrades, they were the natural a...

You may remember our introduction to QR Codes earlier. QR codes are a 2D barcode that can hold large amounts of data, usually a link, and are becoming more and more popular. QR codes are a great tool in merging online and physical marketing but, like any tool, the key is to use them ...

We have previously written about Kyrus Tech Inc and have highlighted their unique capability called Carbon Black. We have worked with the team of experts there in the past and I am very proud to have been professionally associated with Michael Tanji since we were both in government in ...

If you are deciding on a new offsite backup solution to replace tapes in a medium-sized organization you have a lot of choices. Right now, many enterprises in the 20- 2000 employee range are choosing cloud backup services to leverage the much talked about scalability and cost savings. ...

In February this year the agile movement completed 11 years of existence. I am sure you are either using some form of agile methodology or examining the possibility of using them. But, are you aware of how the agile movement happened? Did it happen by chance or was it inevitable? Do yo...

Australia based SaaS provider Movideo is dumping its open source based cloud provider (based on the LAMP stack) and going with Microsoft Azure to improve performance of the company's bottom line. Movideo is not so hot on either Google or Amazon for they lack certain features of Micros...

New Supported PowerBuilder Features Support the encoding argument for DataWindow SaveAs function and File functions. Support CSV file type for ImportFile function. Support more Section 508 properties: AccessibleName, AccessibleDescription, & AccessibleRole properties of PB controls ...

When it comes to mobile HTML5 performance, Apple’s iOS platform far surpasses the Android, according to a recent study from Spaceport. The TeamLab Document Editor, which is the first online HTML5 word processor, makes use of all the HTML5 features, according to developer Ascensio Syst...

My daughter likes to glue pictures in a composition notebook – Disney Princesses, giraffes, fairies, Barbie scenes, herself and many other things a kindergartener gravitates towards. Usually she asks for certain characters or a particular animal and I go find and print. This weeken...

So, the new Basecamp is out, released with much applause (and yes, a few groans). We reviewed it last week and found it super promising. Exciting stuff. What’s more exciting than the sexy new project management tool, though, is how it was released. 37signals, the company behind Baseca...

I thought this was pretty interesting.. so for a lighter, geeky-cool post on a Friday afternoon, as I’m busy waiting for large file copies in my home office lab to complete, I thought I’d share it with you.

You may be thinking how a failure can be a game changer. Yes, it is easy to understand that if Windows 8 succeeds then the tablet and smart phone computing would be changed forever, but how can it change the game by failing? Well – if Windows 8 fails then it would be an official endor...

As CEO Steve Ballmer has noted more than once, Microsoft’s future plans see the company going “all in” with the cloud. The company’s cloud play, Azure, offers the capabilities that we might expect from a cloud, and includes infrastructure such as virtual machine...