Serena Software is offering a new free visual design tool to help developers better understand user requirements before they begin coding. Serena’s Prototype Composer, announced on Nov. 5, is a requirements visualization tool that enables business analysts to simulate how applications will look and function before developers begin to write code. The tool is free and can be downloaded from the company’s Web site.

Officials at Serena said users interact with the prototype as if it were the delivered application, confirming requirements with business analysts in real time.

IBM, Lotus and their partners provide a lot of documentation and training. Somewhere in the community of developers, administrators, and users, there is bound to be someone who can provide the answers you need. The biggest hurdle can be in finding where to look for information. This is not a complete list. Actually, it’s a very short list, just to get you started.

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Learn about the Enhanced Quota feature in IBM Lotus Notes V8 that lets you restrict the creation of new calendar entries, to do items, and memos.

The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium’s Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

Open document advocates are debating fundamental questions about whether there should be a single document format or multiple formats that interoperate, and the relative importance of format and applications.

"At the core of our dissatisfaction with the ODF is its supporters’ fundamental view that interoperability is an application thing and not a format thing. Our view is that if there is to be a Universal Document Format, the format must be the nexus of interoperability," said Sam Hiser, vice president of OpenDocument Foundation, explaining the move away from ODF.

PistolStar has introduced the Password Power Plug-In for Lotus Sametime Single Sign-On via Kerberos. This new addition to PistolStar’s framework of authentication plug-ins is also the latest of its solutions incorporating the Kerberos network authentication protocol. PistolStar recently introduced the Password Power Plug-In for Lotus Domino Single Sign-On via Kerberos.

The Plug-In for Lotus Sametime Single Sign-On via Kerberos enables users launching Sametime Connect to achieve single sign-on (SSO) using the Kerberos network authentication protocol to Active Directory. Administrators remove the need to manage a separate password for Sametime Connect and enhance overall password security. No passwords are sent over the network and the user and server are mutually authenticated.

The House Committee on the Judiciary last week apologized to would-be government whistle-blowers for accidentally exposing their email addresses to other individuals who, like them, had used a committee Web site to secretly submit tips about alleged abuses at the U.S. Department of Justice.

The snafu occurred when a clerical employee accidentally included the addresses of all the whistle-blowers in the "To" field of a message that was sent to inform them of changes in the panel’s policy on who could access their information.

Many of the more than 150 email addresses in the distribution list included portions of the names of the whistle-blowers. Also on the list was the public email address of Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a statement released by the Judiciary Committee.

A new email scam is using last week’s wildfires in California to prey on people with generous hearts. The Internal Revenue Service is warning Americans about an email hoax that claims to be from the tax agency and asks for donations for wildfire victims.

Anyone who clicks on the donation link is taken to a fake Web site that asks for the person’s bank account numbers. Instead of using the numbers for charity, the scammers can launch a number of identity theft ploys.

IBM introduced a new video game designed to help university students and young professionals develop a combination of business and information technology skills. Thousands of universities around the world now have access to Innov8, IBM’s new "serious game," available at no charge.

Serious games are computer and video games used as educational and training tools. Just as airline pilots initially learn using flight simulators, many corporations and universities see serious games as an effective way of teaching new skills to a generation that has been brought up in the video game era. In fact, according to The Apply Group, by 2012, between 100 and 135 of the Global Fortune 500 will have adopted gaming for learning, with the U.S., United Kingdom and Germany leading the way.

The Dojo Foundation is proud to announce version 1.0 of Dojo, an Open Source JavaScript toolkit for Ajax development that can be used to build rich Web 2.0 applications.

Dojo provides easy-to-use, high-quality UI components and JavaScript infrastructure critical for building responsive Web applications without the need for proprietary plugins or single-vendor solutions. Only 25K in size, the base of Dojo delivers key support for Ajax, progressive enhancement, animations, and opens the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.

PDF spam, the summertime nuisance that flooded inboxes in early August and then quickly disappeared, is back and worse than ever.

According to multiple threat researchers at security vendors, tens of thousands of spam messages were blasted out last week with attached PDF files, which infect the recipients’ PCs when viewed. The subject lines of the new crop of PDF spam are finance-related, according to security vendors, using phrases designed to get the recipient’s attention such as "your credit report." These e-mails contain no text, simply the attachment.