Organizations should start experimenting with Web apps from Google, Microsoft and other software companies.
The challenges of managing information technology are weighing ever more heavily on in-house IT departments across all sectors. Coupled with the economic difficulties of the last couple years, these challenges are pushing IT in some profoundly new directions, according to research firm Gartner, which said the result is a notable swing toward cloud-based services that's expected to fuel unprecedented growth in cloud computing over the next several years.
Open-source middleware maker WSO2 has launched an open source cloud platform that should be of interest to enterprise Java developers. Called Stratos, it's a fully hosted application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for building and deploying apps and services "with instant provisioning of enterprise servers, including the portal, enterprise service bus (ESB) and application server."
The real innovation in higher education IT is not the technology itself. This may seem obvious now, but it wasn't in the past. It's a recent revelation that comes with changes in the roles of IT staff and faculty in innovation with technology for teaching and learning and in IT organizations and departments on campus.
In an era when Google ranks almost daily as the most-visited website in the world, the question has to arise for any higher education institution: Why create digital repositories?
Ed tech company it's learning is adding Microsoft Office Web Apps and Outlook Live to its electronic learning platform.
On May 14, 2010 a team of students from the University of Michigan will get into a 2011 Ford Fiesta, loaded with an application they've developed, and drive out of Ann Arbor to hit Maker Faire, a do-it-yourself festival in San Mateo, CA. The students are the winners of a competition set up in a three-month computer science class titled "Cloud Computing in the Commute."
Although more than 95 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their use of software as a service (SaaS), 30 percent of enterprises using SaaS have renegotiated their terms before the end of the initial contract period.
Google has updated its codebase, adding features to its Google Docs online suite of applications that make them richer and more collaborative.
Citrix has released versions of its GoToMeeting and Receiver applications for iPad. Both are available now at no charge.