In today’s world of high connectivity, anyone can do virtually anything from home. In fact, the International Telework Association and Council reports that approximately 23 million people work at home at least part time, a number expected to increase as workplace technology becomes more and more seamless. If clocking in from your kitchen is the right choice for you, read on for telecommuting tips from successful home-office professionals.

On a recent August afternoon, 30 adolescent girls sat captivated in a conference room at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Mass. Wide-eyed, they watched a scientist from M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) dip a pink carnation into a vat of liquid nitrogen, and then shatter the frozen flower against the side of a tank.

"Liquid Nitrogen is Cool!" was one of several activities at this year’s EX.I.T.E. (Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering) program, IBM’s week-long day camp for seventh and eighth grade girls. This year, IBM hosted 53 EX.I.T.E. programs worldwide, 16 in North America.

Founded in 1999, and staffed by women volunteers with technical backgrounds, the program aims to do something about the dearth of women in information technology fields by sparking an early interest in technology among schoolgirls.

Integrate your ODF and Microsoft Office 2007 documents into your enterprise and Internet applications more easily than ever before with IBM DB2 9. Review older methods of data interchange with MS Office documents, and learn how MS Office 2007 offers better data interchange. This article discusses interchange with DB2 9 XQuery, Zend Core for IBM, HP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), and PHP Data Objects (PDO) technologies.

The free-of-charge IBM DB2 Migration Toolkit can simplify and improve your migration to DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. This tutorial demonstrates the use of the toolkit to convert a database model from a Microsoft

A tried and tested backup and recovery strategy is essential in preventing data loss. A database can encounter any number of problems, including power interruptions, storage media failure, and application crashes. Each of these can result in a database failure and each failure requires a different recovery action. This tutorial introduces the backup and recovery capabilities in IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows. In addition, it presents a step-by-step approach showing how to recover data in various failure scenarios.

Sherpa Software announced the addition of fuzzy searching capabilities into their Discovery Attender for Lotus Notes product. The new Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures require companies to know the location and the breadth of all electronically stored information as well as have the ability to quickly search all ESI once they are involved in civil litigation. Often, this requires companies to search in less traditional methods.

To increase companies e-discovery reach, Discovery Attender for Notes unveils fuzzy searching, which allows searches to return documents based on likely relevance or "near hits." Examples of this include misspelled words and plural/singular cases. Coupled with Discovery Attender’s keyword pattern matching search criteria, Lawyers, Compliance Officers, and Human Resource Officials can easily locate information, including PCI data, on servers and local machines across the entire organization. In addition, for today’s mobile users, Version 6.4 introduces the ability to initiate a discovery request and view its results from any Blackberry device.

IBM announced that after two years in development and testing by more than 25,000 businesses around the world, Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8 will be generally available today, Friday, August 17. IBM Lotus Notes 8 and IBM Lotus Domino 8 represents the industry’s first enterprise collaboration solution largely designed with input from its customers.

Research and insight gained from IBM R&D Laboratories and businesses worldwide indicate overall collaboration has superceded email as the key characteristic of their desktop experience. Consequently, Lotus Notes 8 is designed to transform the inbox into an integrated workspace that brings together email, calendar, instant messaging, office productivity tools and custom applications.

More than 93 percent of Lotus Notes customers are using the most recent two releases, a high adoption rate. Further, annual service subscription renewal rates within Lotus Notes licenses exceed 20 percent of the industry average, indicating broad, fast adoption. "Some people have actually switched from Microsoft Outlook at home to Notes 8 since we showed them how," said Marc Frasier, IT Mgr, Well Dynamics of New Zealand. "I’m pretty confident that we’ll be rolling out 8.0 pretty close to launch date."

Two years in the making, IBM’s Lotus division finally unveiled version 8 of Lotus Notes and Domino this week. By all accounts the much needed new version offers a modernized user interface and new usability tools and capabilities.

The changes are the result of building the version 8 client on top of the Eclipse-based rich client platform, according to IBM officials. Version 8 represents IBM’s future strategy to create client interfaces built on a common platform so that components of any client application can be provisioned and managed centrally, said Barton Group analyst Karen Hobert.

For example, Notes 8 is built on the same programming model as Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1, which is based on Eclipse.org open standards. The common client framework becomes an open client for mashups and composite applications in addition to the traditional Notes features.

IBM unveiled a new release of its mainframe operating system–the z/OS–adding features that increase the software’s already fortress-like security for online commerce as well as the next generation of highly secure business transactions. IBM also announced new mainframe software that automates security administration and audit processes.

Accountants and senior management at Dell cooked the books for more than three years, moving funds between accounts so the company could show it was meeting its quarterly targets, the company admitted in a filing this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’s the conclusion of a year-long independent investigation into financial shenanigans at the company from 2003 through the first quarter of 2007.