One of myriad lessons learned in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was that a financial supercenter such as New York City had better have an excellent aggregate backup plan in case of another such disaster. It didn’t then, but it will soon.

Wall Street financial decision-makers have come together–with the help of federal, state and local governments–to come up with a project called Wall Street West.

Wall Street West is a $40 million initiative and a partnership of about two dozen northeastern Pennsylvania regional and statewide Pennsylvania economic development agencies, technology investment groups, work force development organizations, educational and research institutions and private-sector experts.

Microsoft’s ISO standardization ambitions for its Office Open XML file format have hit a rough patch, as OOXML recently failed to garner enough votes for fast-track ratification.

ODF (OpenDocument Format) advocates are pleased, but they’re fooling themselves if they think that the lack of ISO standardization for OOXML is going to put any kind of a dent in the dominance that Microsoft holds over the office productivity market.

Burglars broke into Mitt Romney’s Boston presidential campaign headquarters over the weekend, making off with multiple laptops and a television.

Alex Burgos, a spokesman for the campaign, told eWEEK that the burglary happened sometime during the evening of Sept. 9. The forced entry into the building, a harbor side location on Commercial Street in Boston’s North End neighborhood, appeared to be a "routine" burglary, he said, given that neither hard nor electronic copies of files were touched. At any rate, the computer systems are password-enabled and the hard drives are encrypted, Burgos said.

Some programs just won’t die. Eudora 8.0 is a mail and news application from Qualcomm based on the open source Thunderbird client from the Mozilla Foundation. After abandoning Eudora as a commercial product in May, six Qualcomm programmers have released the product to Mozilla for further development under the code name Penelope.

A beta of Eudora 8.0 went live Aug. 31. Users can download it and use it for free, while programmers can view the source code, make changes to it, and share it with others in the community.

IBM announced a free service that will allow users of any computer or mobile device such as the iPhone to gain real-time access to thousands of technical resources and emerging technologies with a simple click of a button. This extension of syndication that IBM is making available is bringing the widest range of technical know how to the fingertips of millions of Yahoo!, Google, NetVibes users and owners of mobile devices such as iPhone.

Cisco’s WebEx unit launched the fall update of its Web conferencing and collaboration suite, which includes a series of enhancements aimed at making Web conferencing easier and more useful after meetings are over.

Among the latest enhancements to the suite–which includes WebEx Meeting Center, WebEx Event Center, WebEx Sales Center, WebEx Training Center and WebEx Support Center–is the ability to record meetings from the WebEx network.

That capability, unique in its ability to enable on-demand streaming and downloading of archived sessions, allows meeting hosts to easily record all meeting content for playback at a later time.

Robert Whiteley and Natalie Lambert have seen the future–and in it, traditional network security is dead. At least that is the message the two Forrester Research analysts delivered to a crowd at the Forrester Security Forum in Atlanta.

According to them, in the next five years the Internet will be the primary connectivity method for businesses, replacing their private network infrastructure as the number of mobile workers, contractors and other third-party users continues to grow. In this new world, which Whiteley and Lambert called "Internet Everywhere," corporations will have to redefine network security and focus on data encryption, managing risk at the endpoint and having strict data access controls, they said.

Service-Oriented Architecture is a popular method for designing enterprise applications, because it provides benefits like reusable components and platform-independent communication. When considering an SOA, it’s essential to factor in data integration. A great deal of legacy data is derived from daily transactions and must be maintained as part of new applications. If you can combine both SOA and data-integration technologies, you benefit through reusability, increased communication with other enterprise applications, and the use of Web services. This article explains how IBM WebSphere DataStage helps make this possible. DataStage, an IBM flagship product, provides a complete solution for real-time data integration that can be handled as a Web service. You’ll use DataStage to develop a sample RTI job, publish it as a Web service, and invoke the Web service with a Java client.

The OpenOffice.org community announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite’s software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.

Despite the best laid plans of colleges and universities, there remains a skills gap between what computer science graduates learn in their undergraduate years and what they need to become proficient in a typical at-work environment.

In short, many people on both sides of the equation–teachers as well as potential employers–say the educational system is not doing enough to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of IT, and that entering the work force often is as much of an educational experience as is college, particularly for programmers.