Part of developerWorks Lotus is IBM Lotus Domino-based. If you connect to it using an IBM Lotus Notes client, you can use Notes features such as replication. This article provides the steps to connect to the site databases and offers troubleshooting tips for making the connection.

This article teaches you how to extend IBM Lotus Sametime Connect so that users can more easily reach out to the coworkers of a chat partner for help. The solution leverages the department hierarchy available in the Profiles component of IBM Lotus Connections. The same solution could easily be extended to help connect your employees to others using relationships unique to your business (for example, those who share particular interests, recognized experts, support organization members, and more).

Through its Share user group and ZNextGen young programmers organization, IBM has been working to make high school students more aware of the existence of mainframe systems and the career opportunities therein.

While recruiting at the college level is not new to IBM, recruiting teenagers is a new approach embraced after the company identified what it considered an information gap at the younger age group.

The 2008 IT Salary Report from research firm Computer Economics projects that despite an economic downturn, U.S. IT workers as a whole will receive a median pay raise of about 3.7 percent in 2008. Read on to see the areas in which a tight supply of skills will cause salaries to rise.

Adobe has released a software fix for what’s described simply as "security vulnerabilities" in its ubiquitous Adobe Reader program, but has not issued public documentation on the risk severity.

The patch, included in Adobe Reader 8.1.2, plugs at least one known critical issue that allows rigged PDF files to be used in code execution attacks, says Kostya Kortchinsky, a vulnerability researcher at Immunity.

Google is coming up with new ways to bundle its Postini security software-as-a-service assets, as the company began offering email filtering, encryption and archiving software in three levels of protection for enterprises.

Google, which has applied the Postini assets to Gmail since it bought the company for $625 million to better compete with Microsoft and IBM in the collaboration software market, is now breaking out three products for Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise. Specifically, Google is now selling Google Message Filtering, geared to help companies quash spam, viruses and other email threats, for $3 per user per year.

Blogging software provider WordPress has shipped an urgent security update to fix an XML-RPC implementation flaw that allows unauthorized third-party editing of blog posts.

With WordPress 2.3.3, the open-source company patches a bug that could let attackers use specially crafted requests to edit posts of any other user on that blog. An attacker would need valid user credentials to edit posts by another user on the blog, WordPress said in an advisory.

European spam networks have pumped out more unsolicited email than those in the U.S. for the third month in a row, according to security vendor Symantec.

Symantec called this a "significant shift" in spam trends as, historically, compromised U.S. computers have been used to send spam, and many spammers have been U.S.-based.

Apple’s OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux operating systems are to be pitted against each other in an ethical hacking contest in Vancouver next month. Run by the organizers of the CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference, the competition is a repeat of the "PWN to Own" contest at CanSecWest in 2007, when security researchers competed to win a MacBook Pro and $10,000. The prize was shared between security researchers Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macauley for their successful use of a zero-day QuickTime vulnerability, which they used to compromise the MacBook. The vulnerability was subsequently found to also affect Windows platforms.

Sometimes, less is more–at least when it comes to user rights and security. Taking a least-privilege approach to user accounts is a key part of any in-depth defense strategy, many analysts and security pros say.

"I think it’s very important… not even just as [a component] of security, but in the broader sense [of] risk posed to the business in IT," said Scott Crawford, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. "Nowhere is that more true than in a Windows environment where there [are] some things at least on the endpoint or desktop… you simply can’t do without administrative privilege."