Platform / OS

Flexible working for efficiency and effectiveness Following the May 2010 general election and resulting budget cuts, the UK public sector faces the toughest challenges in decades. Adoption of leaner, more agile work styles, implementation of mobile and flexible working solutions and some strong executive leadership will be called for if the sector is to continue delivering the required levels of public services while producing the many billions of efficiency savings that will be expected of it.

Every day sees another headline that illustrates how data protection has been ignored, resulting in vital data that has been exposed or lost. There’s no denying that the loss of mobile devices is a key culprit. The Metropolitan Police states that in the UK alone 10,000 handsets are reported stolen each month. And it’s likely that this potential risk will only escalate given that smartphone adoption is set for rapid growth over the next three years. Indeed, a 2009 report predicts that smartphones will double their share of the handset market to 20 percent by 2013¹. Here, Stephen Davies, UK Product Manager for Vodafone Mobile Exchange, shares his thoughts on how enterprises can avoid such pitfalls.

HandStep focuses on the development and implementation of custom solutions and infrastructure designed to connect employees who are using handheld devices with their organisations' business critical systems. The company developed HandStep Toolbox, a set of utilities designed to maximise the power of Afaria and make life easier for system administrators.

Printers are all too often overlooked in an IT purchasing strategy - and this is a great shame. Your printers directly produce the material customers and business partners see, and they also represent a large and mostly unmanaged cost to your business. Recent research found that most organisations are blissfully unaware of the financial costs their printers are racking up, and the environmental cost they are adding to the company's footprint. This is a shame because printers are easily managed and the decision criteria can be easily understood. Printer choices are being driven by the recession and a new environmental awareness - backed up increasingly by regulations. Printer makers are responding to these demands, and the market is moving into a new phase. Users will be choosing to have fewer printers, but larger, more efficient and smarter printers. They may increasingly also choose to buy a print service instead of running and managing all. If you understand the direction of the market, and the specifications of existing printers, and if you can calculate the output you require, you can compare the likely total cost of ownership for a range of models, and find the one that suits your needs best. We hope this guide will help you do that for your company.

One of the best-kept secrets in the IT industry is the depth of support Oracle offers to customers deploying its databases on Microsoft Windows platforms. Despite its highly visible support of Linux, Oracle was the first of the major database vendors to port its software to Windows in the mid-1990s, and continues to support a large and robust Oracle-on-Windows user community. In this paper, Ovum analyses Oracle Database for Windows in depth.