Stories about: Extensibility

OpenGroupware.org is relatively unknown outside the Open Source developer scene, yet it's one of the oldest projects around: This groupware has origins dating back to 1996.

In the second part of Computerworld's analysis of the Office Open XML debate, platform strategy manager for Microsoft, Sarah Bond, and several Microsoft gold partners offer their views on why the OOXML format should become an internationally approved standard.

Sun used strong-arm tactics and made threats to the owners of an open-source directory project to wrestle away control, according to one of the former owners and creators of the project.

Since the dawn of the business network, there has been a need to ensure that the network services provided to the enterprise are alive and responsive. Traditionally, in midsized businesses, this role has been filled by complex, closed source, and fantastically expensive solutions from manufacturers such as BMC, CA, HP, and IBM. And while these extravagant expenses make no customer happy, many users of these packages also complain of their complexity. Enough administrators have spent enough time wrangling with their monitoring systems to make a lot of smart people imagine that there must be a better way.

When last surveying open source Web CMSes (content management systems) I provided some common-sense advice. For example, it's important to look for not just functionality but also frequent updates, a healthy user community, and the availability of professional support. Some points are still true today, but new offerings may get you rethinking the role of these products in your enterprise.

Web server survey site Netcraft's recent report may have indicated Microsoft's IIS is gaining ground over the venerable open source Apache HTTP server, but version 7.0 is promising to take the challenge to the next level.

Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) continues to narrow the gap with the open-source Apache Web server, with a survey firm suggesting that the longtime second banana could surpass Apache as early as next year.

If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.

The World Wide Web started out as a collection of static pages linked to one another. Of course, this was not enough for long. Today (especially with the arrival of Web 2.0) is the era of the Web application. While static pages still abound, the most popular -- and the most exciting -- sites are dynamic.

Carsten Haitzler, who is perhaps better known by his alias, Rasterman, has been the lead developer for the open source desktop shell Enlightenment for the past 10 years. Since attaining a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of New South Wales in 1997, Haitzler has built a career around his interest in graphics software, and has worked as a core developer at Red Hat and an engineer at VA Linux Systems in the U.S. and Japan.

Chris Blizzard has been involved in the open source software community for over a decade. He has worked extensively on Mozilla's Firefox browser from the time it was open sourced by Netscape in 1998. He then joined Red Hat in 1999 because he "thought it was going to be interesting". At Red Hat he has been in a number of roles - initially building its next generation of support tools, then in its desktop group supporting and promoting its web browser solutions through to today's effort where he has worked on the customised operating system and Sugar User Interface for the One Laptop per Child project.