Cathleen Moore

Adding to its Workplace Solutions lineup, IBM introduced two new vertical-industry-focused deployment options for small and midize businesses. The new small and midize business options are IBM Workplace for Healthcare Clinicians and IBM Workplace for Retail Store Operations. The health care and retail offerings are based on IBM Workplace Services Express, which ties together team collaboration software with an integrated portal.

IBM next month plans to release a new software product designed to bring business intelligence-style data views to the masses. The goal is to make it easier for workers to transform business objectives into accomplished tasks that align with an organization's larger strategy.

The dust is settling after the initial stampede to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and now enterprises are reaching for tools that automate compliance processes and prevent violations. To that end, Virsa Systems Inc. recently launched its Confident Compliance software, designed to integrate into ERP systems for real-time monitoring of transactions and correction of problems.

IBM revealed plans for two new corporate blogging tools it plans to add to the forthcoming Version 2.5 of its Workplace collaboration platform and Workplace Designer development tools. Big Blue also made available a free preview of the blogging tool that will ship with Workplace 2.5 later this year.

Like airborne viruses, instant messaging worms are fledglings, but very much on the rise. These new worms are also proving that once inside a corporate network they can be just as destructive, if not more so, than traditional e-mail attacks.

Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and the forthcoming version of Novell Inc.'s Linux Desktop offering will go head-to-head against Windows, Novell executives said here in Salt Lake City last week at the company's annual BrainShare gathering.

Microsoft Corp. and Siemens Information and Communications on Tuesday plan to unveil an alliance designed to bring together the two vendors' collaboration and communications products.

Binding end-user access to once disparate technologies, vendors such as IBM Corp.'s Lotus division and Open Text Corp. recently launched products designed to pull a variety of point products into a single platform.