Carol Sliwa

The marriage could require a daunting amount of IT work, depending on the degree to which the retailers decide to go to common systems, said several retail technology analysts.

Richard Walstrom said he sensed something was wrong during a job fair in May, when he saw some of his IT co-workers, who had also been told by Best Buy Co. Inc. that they were losing their jobs. "There were a high percentage of people with grey hair," said Walstrom.

A Microsoft Corp. vice president this week confirmed that the company intends to continue its track record of shipping a new version of its Office System software every two to three years. That would place the release date for the new product suite, referred to within Microsoft as "Office 12," between October 2005 and October 2006, since the last version shipped in October 2003.

Before the start of the upcoming holiday season, Woolworths Holdings Ltd. wanted to improve the capabilities of the Java-based data monitoring and alerting system it had hired an outside contractor to build. But the retailer had a problem.

Before the start of the upcoming holiday season, Woolworths Holdings Ltd. wanted to improve the capabilities of the Java-based data-monitoring and alerting system it had hired an outside contractor to build. But the Cape Town-based retailer had a problem.

Microsoft Corp. has yet to release a feature-complete beta version of its upcoming Visual Studio 2005 development tools. But at this week's VSLive conference in Orlando, it announced a refresh of the existing beta release and disclosed more details about the product.

Novell Inc. earlier this month bundled the open-source, J2EE-compliant JBoss Application Server with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, giving application developers a built-in deployment option.

Questions continued to swirl this week about BEA Systems Inc.'s long-term viability as another top executive resigned and the company issued a second-quarter revenue estimate that falls short of expectations.