Ytria announced that scanEZ has won the Lotus Advisor Editor’s Choice Award 2006 in the category of Application Development Tools. Ytria’s flagship software product scanEZ provides professional-grade tools for use throughout the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino application development life-cycle. Lotus Advisor’s panel of expert editors searched for the best, most innovative Lotus Notes and Domino development and administration solutions at this year’s Lotusphere 2006, with Ytria scanEZ gaining recognition for its comprehensive Lotus Notes and Domino development features.

The finalists in this year’s eWEEK Excellence Awards program show that innovation is alive and very well. The program was open to any enterprise product or service that had been announced in 2005 and would be available before March 31, 2006. The initial categorization of entries was performed by eWEEK Labs analysts, who worked with members of the eWEEK Corporate Partner Advisory Board to winnow down the entrants to three finalists in each category.

AedifiComm announced that WorkplaceControl for Notes has been awarded the Lotus Advisor Editors’ Choice Award 2006 in the category of Administration Client Management & Configuration. WorkplaceControl offers the ultimate solution for centralized implementations of migrations and consolidations.

CrossTec announced today the availability of the latest version of Activeworx Security Center information management software. Activeworx Security Center version 3.0 offers information technology security managers a variety of new features including a quicker and more reliable way to verify if a security event is a genuine system threat. The new correlation engine in Activeworx 3.0 adds intelligent automation to the Activeworx Event Framework. It does this by using simple flow chart symbols to create complex rules that have the ability to correlate against existing data and additional events. When a suspect event is detected in one device’s log file, the software takes action based on those rules to check other security information in the system making sure that the event is a real threat. It also has the ability to group events with commonalities, such as those involved in Brute Force attacks, into a single event with more in-depth information.

Symantec is releasing a data backup product that the company claims avoids risks associated with tape backup systems. The software, called the NetBackup PureDisk Remote Office Edition 6.0, is aimed at enterprise-level customers, particularly those in remote offices, said Wim De Wispelaere, senior product manager. PureDisk is derived from Symantec’s acquisition of DataCenter Technologies, based in Belgium, in April 2005.

An estimated 3.6 million U.S. households–or about three out of every 100–reported being victims of identity theft, according to a government study that counted misuse of someone else’s cell phone, credit card or personal information. The figures released by the Justice Department differ from findings of a previous government study that counted 9.3 million victims of the crime. An earlier report by the Federal Trade Commission found about 10.1 million people experienced identity theft in 2003 and 9.1 million in 2004. The Justice Department said the different results may be due to differences in the methods used to collect the data, the period of time considered and counting methods.

Percussion Software announced that its ServerAdmin Plus Database Management Module has been awarded the 2006 Lotus Advisor Editors’ Choice Award in the category of Administration: Server Management. This is the fourth consecutive year the product has been honored by Lotus Advisor. ServerAdmin Plus is one of Percussion’s line of innovative Power Tools for Lotus Domino. An enterprise-strength solution, ServerAdmin Plus empowers organizations to automate complex Domino environments and easily address critical administrative challenges including Security, Users and Groups, Mail Files and Databases and Client Management.

Google has admitted that a few users’ Google Mail accounts were mistakenly deleted, but the search giant claims it is not responsible. "We have seen a few cases where users report that their accounts have been deleted, and in each case our investigations have revealed that the accounts were deleted by someone with that account’s password. In these cases, we’re unfortunately unable to restore accounts," a Google spokeswoman told ZDNet UK.

Yahoo has called for "effective" legislation, combined with industry self-regulation, to deal with online fraud, child abuse and other cybercrime. The Internet services giant appealed on Thursday for policymakers to concentrate on defining illegal use of technology, rather than focus on how an action breaks the law.

With daughter not having school yesterday, I was under the mistaken impression that it was Saturday, thus depriving our readers of their end-of-week news. This can sometimes happen when you work from home. As amends, I offer up yesterday’s news today.–Ed.