“Do more with less” has been the official mandate for IT departments every where for some time now, and considering our economic climate, that refrain will ring more loudly than ever in the year to come. However, before we return from the holiday break and set ourselves to work busily doing more of the same, I think it’s worth examining the areas in which we can accomplish more by doing less…

Microsoft recently announced plans to discontinue OneCare, the company’s consumer-oriented, subscription-based anti-malware product. Instead, Microsoft will offer a free-of-charge anti-malware offering called Morro. I know that conventional wisdom, certain government and industry regulations, and Windows’ “Danger, Will Robinson” Security Center alert shield all disagree with me, but I’m not convinced that anti-virus products (as we know them) are even worth what Microsoft plans to charge for Morro. That’s because no matter how much you pay (or don’t pay) in anti-virus…

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made blogosphere headlines by mentioning that Microsoft might look at embracing Webkit, the open-source Web browser rendering engine that powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. I think that a Microsoft move to Webkit—not only for the company’s mobile platforms but for the full-size version of Internet Explorer—makes great sense and would yield dividends for users, for developers and for Microsoft itself. Rendering Web pages properly is the No. 1 job of a Web…

A few weeks ago, managed hosting provider Rackspace bolstered its cloud hosting division with a pair of major new acquisitions—cloud storage vendor JungleDisk and virtual server provider Slicehost. I was struck by the announcements Rackspace made that day, but the part of the event that stuck most stubbornly in my head was the old news about the company’s messaging service offerings. The messaging services arm of Rackspace, called Mailtrust, serves up e-mail, contacts and calendar hosting via the familiar Microsoft…

Over the past year or so, I’ve been pretty breathless in my enthusiasm for cloud computing, and my enthusiastic writings around the topic have prompted a pile of reader mail containing many valid concerns over a possibly cloudy IT future. I’ll admit that I’m an unabashed cloud cheerleader–I view it as an IT game-changer with the potential to dissolve enough of the friction associated with new technology initiatives to enable IT departments to act with more bottom line-enhancing agility. You…

The impending announcement of Microsoft’s cloud operating system at the company’s Professional Developers Conference has me thinking about how the struggle between open source and proprietary software models will play out in the cloud. There’s been much chatter about how the relocation of code from one’s premises to the virtual skies might threaten, render irrelevant or somehow derail the growth of open-source software by upsetting its natural licensing boundaries and advantages. However, the growth of closed source cloud alternatives will…

For the past six years or so, my office productivity suite of choice has been OpenOffice.org. In that time, I’ve watched the suite progress slowly but steadily toward the goal of being “just as good” as Microsoft Office. And yet, for my needs, the free software suite has been Office-like enough since Version 1.0. In fact, considering that I’ve spent the past six years using a Linux desktop, which Microsoft’s Office does not support, OpenOffice.org has been better than good…

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to get my hands on Research In Motion’s much-anticipated touch-screen device, the BlackBerry Storm. The new device, which had been known in rumor mill circles as the Thunder, offers up an ingenious solution to the thumb keyboard versus virtual keyboard dilemma: The Storm’s touch-screen is built atop a mechanical apparatus that turns the whole thing into one big button. I spent a bit of time tapping away on the Storm’s new 480-by-360-pixel display,…

Recently, Cameron Sturdevant and I waded into the world of application whitelisting–a set of products and technologies aimed at ensuring the integrity of Windows clients by enforcing control over which applications are allowed to run. I think that whitelisting, when combined with diligent paring of user and application privileges, can go a long way toward granting workers leave to worry less about whether they are “security idiots” (to borrow a bit of Jim Rapoza’s phraseology) and focus more on getting…

Recently, eWEEK Labs has been putting a handful of high-profile smartphones through their paces, which has led us to consider what elements would comprise the ideal business smartphone. While it’s easy to get caught up in the physical characteristics of a device, there’s more to an effective device than the slimness of its chassis or the thumb-friendliness of its miniature keyboard. As with any computing device, a smartphone is only as good as its software, and the most suitable smartphones…