IBM has announced an upgrade to Lotus Notes that will include access to office productivity applications and support for the OpenDocument format. The new version of Lotus Notes, codenamed "Hannover," will feature IBM Workplace applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and numeric data analysis. These "office productivity editors," as IBM refers to them, all support OpenDocument Format (ODF) files.

The number of companies reporting a spyware infestation has increased by almost half in the past 12 months, according to a new survey. In addition, 17 percent of companies with more than 100 employees have spyware such as a keylogger on their networks, said the authors of the annual Websense Web@Work survey, published on Tuesday.

CA announced a third executive departure on May 15 when it said that Robert Davis, executive vice president and chief financial officer, will leave. Davis, who took over the CFO job in February 2005, follows the announcement last week that CA’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Barrenechea is leaving. In mid-April Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke announced his departure. No reason was given for Davis’ departure, although CA called it a mutual agreement.

With the exception of the Thinkpad X41 tablet, Lenovo is rounding up the rest of the Thinkpads and giving them Intel Core Duo updates. The company announced May 16 that its Thinkpad Z series, including the Z61m and Z61t, as well as the budget-friendly Thinkpad R60, will receive dual-core processing power. The Thinkpad Z61t is the more portable version of the Thinkpad Z61m, weighing under 5 pounds. The machine still maintains a 14.1-inch screen and Thinkpad keyboard and Trackpoint.

With the purchase of any new BlackBerry, download BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express and get BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express free giving you access to the suite of wireless data features provided in the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution that includes email, corporate data, instant messaging, phone, browser access, MMS and SMS, organizer.

Rakesh Agrawal, who is credited with creating data mining, or the science of extracting trends from large and often disparate databases, has left IBM to become a Microsoft technical fellow in the company’s Search Labs. Agrawal–who had been an IBM fellow, the company’s highest title for researchers–is one of the better-known scientists in data extraction and databases. Data mining is a hot topic because it has emerged that the federal government has begun to use the method to examine millions of phone records. Corporations, though, have exploited it for years as a way to understand customer behavior and enhance their own Web traffic.

CertFX Practice Tests are one of the best ways to prepare for your certification exam. All questions and answers are geared towards the real exam. CertFX is making it easy by offering 40% off all CertFX Practice Tests. This offer is valid one day only, May 16, 2006, so don’t delay. Use the "MAY16ONLY" coupon code at checkout.

IT resellers nationwide can now leverage Tech Data’s IBM One Team to quickly develop, sell and support a broad range of IBM solutions. The distributor’s IBM One Team comprises dedicated sales representatives, product specialists and systems engineers all cross-trained to support IBM’s extensive hardware, software and services offerings. The IBM One Team offers resellers dedicated pre- and post-sales support for IBM servers, storage, workstations, accessories and software applications.

Trusted operating systems have been used for some time to lock down the most sensitive of information in the most sensitive of organizations. But with security concerns rising and changing by the hour, it’s now a matter of trust for any organization looking to tighten its computing ship. Several vendors, including Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and Novell, are responding by adding and/or improving trusted elements in their operating system offerings.

A new test created by Internet security portal, PC Flank, has demonstrated that all major firewall programs can be bypassed and that none of them can prevent a leak of your personal information from Internet-connected computers. The test is called the PC Flank Leaktest and it attempts to upload user-specified text data directly to PC Flank’s server, completely undetected by your firewall. To the creators’ astonishment, all of the top-tier commercial firewalls failed the test. Every known firewall, except for the Tiny firewall, allowed the custom data to be transmitted to the test location. None of the firewalls could deter a genuine, malicious attempt to steal your private data. These results emphasize the fact that, while most firewalls provide reliable protection against inbound data threats, they are often incapable of providing outbound protection, allowing your private information to be accessed by hackers.