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A new blended concept has emerged within the managed services realm in the form of co-sourcing. Co-sourcing is defined as a service performed by both internal and external resources and accurately describes the relationship between a managed services provider and an organization's technical staff...

If you took part in Thursday's live online presidential town-hall meeting, you had the chance to submit your questions to President Obama via text or video. Then you got to vote on the popularity of the questions, effectively ranking them for the president's staff to consider ...

Why? Virtualization reduces costs by lowering hardware needs andrepetitive maintenance tasks. Often, scheduled maintenance on multipleservers and patching dozens of workstation computers requires IT staffto work after normal business hours when the hardware can be taken offline...

While the commercial software visual elements are almost always better, it's not because the proprietary graphics software is better than the open source version. The difference is that the commercial software manufacturer more than likely has people whose sole job is to design graphics, and it's entirely possible that person is both talented and skilled at it. But really, the difference is even bigger than just having graphics staff...

Lowered telephony costs could be a major incentive. "Skype gives businesses a really cheap way to make calls," IDC analyst Rebecca Swensen told the E-Commerce Times. "Calls over the Skype network to other Skype users are free, and none of the other VoIP vendors can offer that." users such as salespeople already use Skype in the field, so implementing Skype at the back end will not involve any disruption to the way mobile staffers work, Swensen said...

The Seattle P-I had an extensive and dynamic blog section, as is to be expected in a city that champions citizen and neighborhood journalism. As you can imagine, the newspaper's own reporter/bloggers had other things on their minds; a staff of 150-plus was being whittled down to 20 -- all to cover a metro area encompassing 3.2 million people...

In a day and age when organizations have access to more information than ever and the market is littered with vendor solutions, why do so many organizations fall short in successfully leveraging their collective knowledge to drive better business results? In practical terms, it comes down to the vast gulf between having loads of data versus having practical knowledge. For example, CRM systems do a good job of telling management and their staff "what to do next" as opposed to "how to do that next step." Organizations have the component pieces in place, but they need to tie it together in a different way to break out of the CRM shoebox. ...

After 146 years of publication, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer print edition is no more. Seattle's oldest newspaper, which is owned by media giant Hearst, will continue as an online-only publication starting Wednesday, but with a much-reduced news staff "The P-I has a rich 146...

At a macro level, the equation is simple: The workload of certain areas in our security organization is directly tied to business activity. So when business activity is down -- as is the case right now -- organizations that were staffed to capacity prior to the downturn now have slack space in the workload of these folks. Since the cost of replacing these resources is high, it's probably cost-prohibitive to adjust levels of staff to meet the change in the short-term demand. ...

Anthony Mitchell , an ECT News Network columnist, has been involved with the Indian IT industry since 1987, specializing through InternationalStaff.net in offshore process migration, call center program management, turnkey software development and help desk management. He may be contacted at Mitchell.tel...

Symantec began deleting posts in the Norton Users Forum because they were abusing the forum's terms of service, Symantec staff member Dave Cole said. "Within the first hour there were 600 new posts on this subject alone," he said Luckily for Symantec, none of the spam had mali...

It's easily configurable so other devices and applications can be integrated when necessary, he added, a plus for the company's lean IT department, which consists of one staffer There has also been an increase in customer satisfaction since the platform was implemented, Schulz...

"We believe we can increase storage capacity by two to three times and reduce staff requirements by two to three times as well," Schmitt said ...

I expect we will see some significant revenue growth from our new product. We have new partnerships with project execution blackbelts like Cognitive Technologies, an IT consulting company that specializes in project and program management for the federal government andFortune 1000 companies. A year from now, we are hoping we will be seen as the go-to source for staffing and executing hundreds of projects simultaneously...

Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says there may be an ulterior motive for Dart's actions, since he's also giving it little chance of proceeding thanks to a 2007 Federal Court of Appeals case -- also against Craiglist -- that held the company was not liable for allegedly discriminatory housing ads placed on the site. "What's probably going on here is an attempt to try to pressure Craigslist in the court of public opinion by literally making this a federal case, and trying to shame them into essentially doing something more," Zimmerman told the E-Commerce Times...

Ten years. My battered 401K tells me that was about three lifetimes ago. Social networks, iPhones and Google make those days seem like the Jurassic period of technology, if you're measuring in Internet time, and why wouldn't you? And the recent doings of some current CNBC staffers tell me that things have truly changed since I worked for the world's leading financial news network...

Finally, THQ announced it would lay off nearly the entire staff of its Volition quality assurance team. The announcement follows earlier staff reductions of some 600 employees, roughly 24 percent of the company's workers. After announcing significant loses recently -- US$191.8 million and a 30 percent decline in revenue -- and a share price that has fallen from $20 to about $2, it's anybody's guess whether the game maker will weather the 2009 financial storm or wind up in the bankruptcy or acquired bins...

Test rapidly and keep it current. Virtualization allows companies to take snapshots of their production environments and store them on a storage area network (SAN) or other device/media. DR plan testing can then be done on these snapshots, which eliminates the laborious build, install and restore process typically required for traditional DR testing. This reduces several aspects of the testing process, including its complexity, the number of specialized staff required, propensity for human error, and cost. By using recent snapshots of the production servers, companies can be assured that they are testing the most current system configurations as opposed to maintaining recovery site configurations, configuration manuals, etc...

In watching congress pound on the automotive companies about the use of corporate jets, I couldn't help but think of the vastly larger and more expensive jets used by Nancy Pelosi and Barak Obama. Obama has a 747, and Pelosi has her own jet issues. In these hard times, couldn't both use smaller jets, rely more on video conferencing (at least for staff), and have the folks flying with them mostly fly commercial? In fact, with particular focus on Obama, why not use a B1 or B2? The President would be in the air for a shorter period of time, be better protected while en route, and you could rotate in aviators who needed to keep their flight hours up in the bombers with a potential significant net savings to the country.

If IT organizations don't properly manage these privileged people an IT staffer can either accidentally or maliciously compromise or destroy the operations of the business. This is even more critical in today's economy, where a growing number of layoffs increase the probability that some of today's superuser "key holders" may not be with your organization tomorrow...