At its Rational Software Development Conference, IBM plans to officially launch more than 20 products based on and connected to its Jazz-collaborative development environment.

Dave Locke, director of worldwide marketing for IBM Rational, said that what the Eclipse integrated-development environment did for bringing desktop development together, Jazz is doing for collaboration.

As more and more people exclusively use PCs to maintain their most valuable documents, including family photos and video, extensive music collections, even crucial work files, the risks posed by accidental data deletion can represent a true personal catastrophe. What’s worse, many people who lose files aren’t aware that readily available, easy-to-use software exists that can instantly restore precious documents and irreplaceable digital photos they feared were gone forever.

To prevent this frustrating, yet reversible data loss from imperiling users’ important files, iolo technologies announced the release of a new, even easier-to-use version of its Search and Recover software, which allows even non-expert users to quickly recover accidentally deleted files even years after the data was lost.

Safeguarding your data is no longer an option but is a necessity. Government legislation has issued directives for organizations to report publicly if any security breach that has caused to compromise personal information. Despite this requirement, most enterprises, large corporate can only account for 60% of their computing possessions and even more shocking, 73% of companies do not have specific security policies documented for their laptop or desktop computers.

Disk Doctors File Shredder recently launched by Disk Doctors Labs is a desktop tool that can be used to securely erase important files and wipe all its traces from any windows based operating environment.

Adobe is launching a couple of new products, one of which is aiming squarely at the online document creation and collaboration market. Acrobat.com (Beta) features online Word processing, file sharing, and the ability to hold online meetings. Buzzword is the name of the word processing application allows multiple participants to create and edit documents online via Adobe Share. Adobe Brio is the online meeting application.

The other product Adobe is rolling out is Acrobat 9 which now includes Flash into its PDF creation software. You can now create a document that supports embedded Flash as a component of the document.

Mainsoft, an IBM business partner and provider of Microsoft-Java interoperability software, is working with IBM Rational software to integrate IBM Lotus Quickr and Microsoft SharePoint, two popular Web 2.0-based collaboration workspaces, into future releases of IBM Rational Team Concert and other Jazz-based products.

IBM is the latest major OEM to add Advanced Micro Device’s quad-core Opteron processors to its server portfolio. The company will now officially begin selling three different System x servers that use AMD’s quad-core chip, formally code-named Barcelona. The three systems are the System x3455, x3655 and x3755.

The announcement marks a long-awaited milestone for AMD. Now, all four of the major server vendors–Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and IBM–along with a host of smaller system vendors now offer quad-core Opterons within their product portfolios.

Since the advent of the PDA–and to a lesser degree, cell phones and laptops–workers have been decrying the end of vacation as they know it. Technology has given employers the ability to reach workers at all times in all places–making it impossible for employees to maintain boundaries between times off and being on-the-clock. The villains in these equations were a combination of pushy bosses, workers with poor time-management skills and wireless connectivity.

However, reports and studies increasingly suggest that many workers simply can’t disconnect. One in four workers said they plan to stay connected with work while they’re on vacation this summer, a percentage that has nearly doubled in the last two years, according to a survey released by CareerBuilder.com May 20.

Revision3’s servers were brought down over the Memorial Day weekend by a denial of service attack. It’s an all too common occurrence these days. But this one wasn’t your normal cybercrime–there’s a chilling twist at the end. Here’s what happened, and why we’re even more concerned today, after it’s over, than we were on Saturday when it started.

It all started with just a simple "hi." Now "hi" can be the sweetest word in the world, breathlessly whispered into your ear by a long-lost lover, or squealed out by your bouncy toddler at the end of the day. But taken to excess–like by a cranky 3-year old–it gets downright annoying. Now imagine a room full of hyperactive toddlers, hot off of a three hour Juicy-Juice bender, incessantly shrieking "hi" over and over again, and you begin to understand what our poor servers went through this past weekend.

Succeeding at the art of telecommuting requires extra vigilance on the part of remote employees–making it abundantly clear that you’re not only in the loop, but you’d like to stay in it. Here are some suggestions for making your presence felt in the office, no matter where you happen to be working.

The market for software to protect mobile devices such as smartphones has yet to take off despite brisk sales of devices such as Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone.

For now, security on mobile devices is seen as an extra feature on programs designed to fight malicious software on personal computers and laptops, said Mike Haro, senior analyst with Sophos, the largest privately held security software maker.