This week, the Macworld Conference and Expo returns to San Francisco, and, for the first time since the 2002 show in which Apple’s pre-show boast of, “Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond” turned out to refer to a flat-panel iMac, I’m feeling excited about the announcements that the Black Mock-Turtlenecked One might hand down in his annual Expo keynote. It’s not that I expect Apple to confirm my June 2005 prediction that the firm would unbind OS X from Apple-only…

Microsoft’s release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is nigh, which means that it’s nearly time for organizations sold on a “better SP1 than sorry” approach toward deploying Microsoft’s latest client operating system to start polishing off their imaging tools. However, based on the conversations I have had with readers and with eWEEK’s Corporate Partners, it seems that many IT managers are viewing Vista’s SP1 not as a green light for deployments, but as something like a pop-up reminder…

Today my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting on Mandriva founder Gael Duval’s Ulteo, which now offers online access to the OpenOffice.org productivity suite: OpenOffice.org goes online with SAAS version I’m an OpenOffice.org user and overall fan of software as a service–particularly when it’s a free service–so I thought I’d take Ulteo for a spin…

Eyeing the trends around user-friendly Linux desktops, sub-$500 notebooks, universal broadband, and Web 2.0 office applications, my colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols opines that we’re on the brink of a low-end Linux revolution. For my part, I’m not so sure. Without question, Linux has matured into a effective, manageable, and low-cost solution for companies’ and individuals’ computing needs–I’ve been getting my work and play accomplished quite nicely since just after Windows XP went gold, in 2001. However, I’m severely underwhelmed by…

Last week I wrote about how the lack of a Linux and open source answer to Microsoft’s Active Directory is slowing the spread of desktop Linux. Could the Linux and open source answer to Active Directory be Active Directory? Today, Likewise Software (the firm formerly known as Centeris) launched a new open source software project that consists of the authentication services core of the firm’s Linux-to-Active Directory product, Likewise Enterprise. The project, called Likewise Open, is licensed under the GPL…

Earlier this year, while writing about the fortunes of Linux on the enterprise desktop, I came across the paper, “World Domination as an Optimization Hack,” in which the GNOME Foundation’s Federico Mena-Quintero identifies bulk Linux deployments as the lowest hanging fruit for Linux moving forward. Although Mena-Quintero doesn’t call it out explicitly, the common thread that runs through administrator feedback he presents in the paper is the absence of directory services and the management functions, such as Group Policy, that…

I scratched the surface of three of the most popular Linux distributions out there–and I took plenty of screen shots. Desktop Linux Trio Offers Look at What’s To Come Review: The latest versions of fast-moving OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora make a strong case for Linux on the desktop, but there’s lots of integration work to be done. Desktop Linux Showdown Slide Show: OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora are three of the most popular and innovative Linux distributions available. But do their…

Last week I attended a technical workshop on Windows Server 2008 at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, where I, alongside a gaggle of other tech journalists from all over the world, spent three days having my head stuffed with details about Microsoft’s forthcoming server products, including its new solution for mid-sized companies. Microsoft’s newly-minted Windows Essential Business Server offers a very compelling answer to the question, “How can a mid-sized business consume all the same sorts of Microsoft core server products that…

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format. Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced–but did not release publicly–about a year and a half ago. At the heart of the rift between the…

On Tuesday morning, while jotting down some column ideas, I took note of the top two items I wanted to see from Google’s Gmail service: 1. Enable IMAP access to mail; and 2. Make labels persist beyond Gmail’s Web UI. On Wednesday afternoon, I found that Google had satisfied both of those desires, and moved a step closer to making Gmail migrations a real option for companies running Exchange…