Infrastructure

ORLANDO - Microsoft Corp.'s annual North American customer conference got underway Monday in Orlando with much chatter on the past, present and future of middleware solutions.

Sutter Health put off a major IT initiative for years because it was daunted by the project's complexity. Now, the nonprofit health care organization is going forward with its plans to integrate patient data scattered across dozens of different systems.

A federal Crown corporation responsible for aviation security services is in the process of testing biometric technology as part of its new restricted area identification card (RAIC) program.

Citing its improved .Net integration and an ability to support faster rollouts, Microsoft Canada Co. officially unveiled its BizTalk Server 2004 suite in Toronto Tuesday.

Four months after acquiring SuSE Linux AG, Novell Inc. continues to hammer out the details of its open source strategy. It announced plans Friday to make its GroupWise software available for the Linux operating system for the first time, and confirmed that it plans to release the source code for a popular SuSE tool for managing Linux servers to the open source community.

In a move aimed at keeping its new installed base happy, PeopleSoft Inc. is rolling out a refresh of the green-screen-based World applications it inherited last summer with its purchase of J.D. Edwards & Co.

E-business standards group OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) last month developed a comprehensive adoption blueprint for Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology.

Hewlett-Packard Co. last week released new business desktops running Mandrake Linux, making it the first of the world's top PC providers to ship a pre-loaded Linux desktop.