IT Manager's Journal

Developers enjoy being on the cutting edge of technology, using the latest programming languages, development environments, and tools. Bookstores and conferences are packed full of topics like Java, Ruby on Rails, C#, Ajax and others. Unfortunately a "dirty little secret" of computing exists that is only now becoming a topic of conversation: Cobol, Fortran, and Assembler continue to run a majority of the critical applications in our lives.

CIOs are charged with being agile and responsive to the needs of the business, yet struggle to maintain their legacy applications. How can you become agile when you have a six month development cycle and no-one truly understands the application any more?

Designing and implementing a new application can be an uphill battle of finding sufficient resources and maintaining redundancy. Using grid architecture to build an application offers low cost redundancy, parallel processing, and easy resource allocation.

When people talk about free and open source software (FOSS) being revolutionary, they are usually talking about the software freedoms it grants users. However, as FOSS continues to become a major business tool, it is also revolutionizing corporate software procurement policy say Theresa Bui-Friday, vice president of marketing at co-founder of Palamida and Doug Levin, founder and CEO of Black Duck Software, whose companies' business models both focus on helping clients development suitable policies and practices to manage the risk.

If you spend most of your time in OpenOffice.org, you might want to be able to manage to-do lists and tasks without leaving the comfort of the office suite. Since Writer doesn't have such a feature, you can create your own no-frills task tool and at the same time sharpen your OOoBasic skills.

While there are volumes of online magazines, blogs, trade magazines, and books written about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), everything I need to know about SOA, I already learned from Linux and the Open Source Software movement.

UK-based Packt Publishing has announced the finalists for its Open Source CMS Award: CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla!, and PHP-Fusion. The overall winning project, scheduled to be announced in November, will receive $5,000, with an additional $15,000 distributed among runners-up and subcategory winners.

When wiki-based software guide ITerating launched earlier this year, the plan was simple: Create an editable directory of open source, commercial, and hosted software. Visitors use the site to research products, read and write consumer reviews, and compare features to make informed purchasing decisions. Now ITerating has added a unique feature to help make sure system administrators never miss an important patch or version update again.

The conventional method of benchmarking software application performance is a pretty straightforward process: run a single application, measure its performance, analyze the results, repeat as needed. Once you throw virtual machines running various applications into the mix, however, the process becomes unwieldy and the data less accurate. VMware wants to eliminate the guesswork with VMmark, a virtualization benchmarking tool designed to help IT departments make better decisions about hardware purchases and distributed workloads.

For IT managers researching software purchases, the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. While there is an abundance of information available on virtually every piece of software on the market, knowing which software -- or whose -- to trust is part skill and part luck. The process is also difficult because typical software review Web sites don't allow users to customize search criteria based on their unique needs, so Internet-based research is often painstaking and sometimes fruitless. Nicolas Vandenberghe, founder and CEO of the new site ITerating, hopes to ease the pain of software comparison shopping by blending the usefulness of user reviews with the power of wiki-based search functionality.

I broke down and read Getting Things Done (GTD) in February (after letting the book sit unopened on the couch for a month). When I finished, I was determined to adopt the popular organizational method. I searched for a solid software tool to track projects and next actions, and found dozens of desktop-oriented applications to choose from. One of the GTD axioms is to collect all of your tasks, projects, and lists in one place; since I regularly use four PCs and laptops and a mobile phone, finding a GTD-aware tool that would run as a Web app was paramount. I settled on Tracks; it is open source, easy to use, and accessible from anywhere.

A clear sign that free and open source software (FOSS) has become mainstream is the growing number of small consultants who specialize in it. Listed on local users groups or high-tech forums and working mostly by themselves, these consultants rarely make headlines, yet they represent a sizable and growing niche in small business in modern North American cities.

Bitrock's InstallBuilder and Macrovision's Install Anywhere Enterprise edition are tools for building third-party software installers. InstallBuilder uses Qt widgets, while Install Anywhere requires a Java Virtual Machine, but both are cross-platform, multi-lingual, proprietary tools that are available in downloadable demos. Both, too require minimal expertise to use. When run in wizard mode, Install Anywhere is more basic than InstallBuilder and suffers in comparison, but, when run in Advanced Designer mode, it eclipses its rival with a huge set of options.

Funambol, an open source Java-based SyncML application, reached a milestone in September with the release of v3.0. The software provides calendar and address book linkage for groupware and mobile devices. Funambol started out more than three years ago as Sync4j, with a project on SourceForge.net. From humble beginnings, Funambol has today become a company that sells commercial support contracts, but still makes its software available under the GPL.

The ultimate goal of the Unicode Consortium is to define all human languages for use with computers. That goal is still some ways off, but, with the release of version 5.0 of the Unicode standard after nearly three years of work, the consortium has taken a step toward it, according to Mark Davis, president of the Unicode council and one of the founders of the standard. With the publication due shortly, Davis recently took the time to explain Unicode, how it is developing, and some of the challenges it faces.

For many, returning to classes means returning to slide shows. Once used mainly in business, today slide shows are equally important in education. Students use them in portfolios to share their mastery of a subject, and many consider them a basic requirement for class presentations. Yet, despite the ubiquitousness of slide shows, few people use them well. Here are some tips to help you improve your presentation skills.

Journyx is a closed-source, proprietary software vendor with a business model that embraces -- albeit at arm's length -- open source. How can that be? The paradox results from a unique business model that attempts to provide a free-as-in-beer product for the majority of users, support and use open source software projects, and still turn a profit. I recently spoke to Journyx founder and CEO Curt Finch to learn more about that business model, and about TimeSheet, the software Journyx produces and (mostly) gives away.

Sun Microsystems must have figured digital rights management (DRM) never sounded so good when it recently announced a call for partners in its quest to use open source DRM to "compensate rights holders and stimulate innovation," but Sun's open DReaM (DRM everywhere available) Project is as scary as any other content control nightmare to open source and digital freedom proponents.

IBM and Red Hat have jointly announced a global initiative to help accelerate the development and adoption of Linux-based solutions in emerging markets, such as China, India, Russia, and Korea, as well as in established markets worldwide. I talked with Todd Chase, Program Director, IBM Innovation Centers, about the program and why it should be of interest to every IT manager involved with Linux and open software.

As a project manager, what software do you find essential? Well, if you're good, you'll say none -- there's nothing that you can do on a PC that you can't do with a pencil and paper. However, if you want help from software, and you don't have unlimited funds for proprietary applications such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Project, there are a number of Linux-based project planners that you can choose from. If you want one that's simple but covers many of the basics, consider Imendio Planner.

Xandros Business Edition provides a desktop environment that looks and feels much like a better-looking Windows 2000. Unlike Windows, Xandros is easy to install and maintain, and it doesn't come with all of the security flaws and virus vulnerabilities that Windows has. As an added bonus, Xandros Business Edition includes the full edition of CrossOver Office 4.2 (other editions of Xandros include only a 30-day trial). That means that if there is a major Windows software package that you can't live without, chances are you will be able to install and run it on Xandros through CrossOver. In short, Xandros is now ready to eliminate Windows from corporate desktop computers.