The OpenDocument Foundation–a group whose name and charter would lead one to believe that it was backing the OpenDocument Format (ODF), but which ended up backing a different document format instead–has closed its doors. Sam Hiser, a systems consultant who was Vice President & Director Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, confirmed that ODF is closing its doors. Hiser and a number of the other OpenDocument Foundation backers earlier this year decided to throw their weight behind a Worldwide Web Consortium document standard, the Compound Document Format (CDF), and back away from ODF.

IBM, Sun Microsystems, Google and other ODF backers are continuing in their campaign to fight OOXML. Microsoft is pushing for standards recognition for OOXML, in large part, so that Office 2007, which uses OOXML as its default file format, will qualify for lucrative government and commercial IT contracts that call for "open," "standards-based" products. The pro-ODF camp is trying to thwart OOXML in the hopes of gaining more market share for StarOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other products that compete with Microsoft Office. Office still has more than 90 percent of the Windows desktop-productivity-suite market.

IBM Lotus Expeditor provides an end-to-end environment that includes a server, a client that provides support for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, and a toolkit that provides a complete, integrated set of tools you can use to develop, debug, test, package, and deploy client applications. The toolkit is built using Eclipse technology and leverages the Eclipse plug-in framework. This article describes how to use Lotus Expeditor Toolkit to debug and deploy an application to a Windows Mobile 5.0 device and a Windows Mobile 5.0 emulator.

IBM introduced new software to help customers protect their business from today’s most advanced and complex Web application security attacks. The first release of IBM Rational AppScan, a Web application security technology acquired by IBM from Watchfire in July 2007, is a key part of IBM’s software portfolio that helps ensures high quality applications are delivered to the marketplace.

IBM announced the second version of Lotus Symphony, its popular, free desktop document software, which has now been downloaded by more than one-quarter million registered users–88 percent of which are Microsoft customers–in its first two months. The new version of Lotus Symphony, Beta 2, features improved performance, access and ease-of-use.

IBM’s free Symphony desktop software has a good chance of becoming a hosted service that would challenge Google Apps, according to an IBM official. The suite, which let users create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, would eventually include live collaborative editing and online shared storage in the cloud, similar to the way Google positions its suite, Doug Heinzman, director of strategy for IBM collaboration, said in an interview Nov. 9.

The proposition is an indication of how serious traditional vendors view SAAS (software as a service), which Google and Amazon like to call cloud computing, that lets people consume software that is supported by the vendors’ servers.

Gemalto and Lexar, a subsidiary of Micron Technology, introduced the Smart Enterprise Guardian, a unique USB device that natively incorporates industry standards for protecting digital identities and sensitive documents. The SEG combines Gemalto’s .NET-based solution and Lexar’s hardware-based memory encryption technology to provide unrivaled secure mobility for SMBs and Enterprises.

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen will step down from his post at the end of the month, the company said Monday. Effective Dec. 1, President and Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Narayen will take over as CEO of the software company and join its board of directors. Chizen will serve the remainder of his term on the board through the second quarter of 2008 and continue as a strategic advisor for the company until the end of Adobe’s fiscal year 2008, which goes through early December of the calendar year.

Adobe appointed Chizen CEO in 2000; he joined the company in 1994. During his time as top executive of Adobe, the company purchased Macromedia in 2005, making it a leader in the market for providing development and design tools for building RIAs (rich Internet applications). The company also raised its industry profile, becoming a target of larger software vendors, such as Microsoft, for its savvy maneuvering to provide infrastructure for this new wave of Web-based applications.

As promised, we’ve now got ads running in the RSS feeds and are doing testing of this beta feature. If you notice any functional problems with the RSS feeds over the next day or so, please send a note to david@zatz.com.

During the implementation process, we realized that ads in feeds allowed us to do something cool that’ll make the feeds more useful to everyone. Up until now, when you clicked on a link in a feed news item, you were taken to our permalink page for that news item, rather than the actual news item itself. To get to the news item itself required a second click.

The reason for this was economic, of course. If you read the news items solely in the feed and just clicked through to the destination, you’d never see any of our sponsors’ ads, and we wouldn’t be able to continue to provide the service, since that’s what pays for the business.

But now, since you’re seeing ads in the feeds, we can let you click directly to the news items, bypassing the Web page permalink, getting you to the news you’re interested in with one click, rather than two.

In effect, rather than the feeds being a promotional vehicle for our Web site, the feeds become our new news medium directly. We’ll let you know how that all turns out. For now, though, click away, support our sponsors, and let us know if you run into any snags.

This is a short test message. We’re testing the updated system.

If you bought one of Seagate’s Maxtor Basics consumer hard drives recently, check it for viruses. Especially if you’re a gamer.

Seagate is warning that a "small number" of its Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives recently shipped with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus, malicious software that "searches for passwords for online games and sends them to a server located in China," according to a note posted on the Seagate Web site. Only drives purchased since August 2007 are affected, Seagate said.

The hard drive maker is blaming an unnamed subcontractor, located in China, for the problem. Seagate said it learned about the problem from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab. According to published reports, Seagate has had problems with Maxtor Basics drives sold over the past few months in the Netherlands and Taipei.