What happens when adding new disks to a SAN causes pandemonium to a Domino server? In Contributing Editor Nancy Hand’s case, she found an obscure little utility that managed to save the day.

Read this DominoPower article.

According to a recent survey by Evans Data, more than 40 percent of developers polled who said they were working on service-oriented architectures also said they can finish a typical SOA development in three months. The Evans Data poll shows that this 40 percent figure represents more than twice as many developers as last year. Indeed, the company’s latest survey also showed that more than 60 percent of all SOA projects now take only six months or less to complete. The results are part of Evans Data’s new 2006 Web Services Development Survey, which the company will release on Dec. 22. Evans Data officials said the results indicate a growth in maturity of Web services and SOA technologies.

Bizibox is urgently warning business managers to make sure their staff are aware that bragging about their office party antics via email is not appropriate behavior. The exposure risk of personal, and business brand and reputation damage is too high. Bizibox’s Chief Executive Neil Sherratt says "There are many dangers associated with using email that no one has control over. One such problem is the forwarding of your email message by your intended recipient onto someone else. You have no control over this and before you know it you can be in a lot of trouble." Although they can make for entertaining reading, unexpected media exposure is not always good news for either the individuals involved, or for their employer. Both are liable for the consequences. Earlier this year, Bizibox launched the IQ Confidential messaging system into New Zealand and is seeking both Australian and North American partners. IQ Confidential also has a built in file/document collaboration module. IQ Confidential creates a safe, private communications network where only "invited" internal and/or external parties can send messages or share documents and files. IQ Confidential differs from any standard secure email system in that all messages bypass the public Internet and are delivered directly to the IQ Confidential Inbox of the intended recipient.

Business professionals are constantly on the go and, as a result, they do not have time to complete every task in a given a day, even a simple task such as reading an email. MobileVoiceControl, recently acquired by Nuance Communications, believes that it has a remedy for that problem with its Narrator service, which will allow users to have their emails read aloud them. The Mason, Ohio-based speech products provider announced Dec.19 that its Narrator service is available for BlackBerry Pearl smartphone users, allowing incoming email messages on their BlackBerry device to be read aloud to users through their handset’s speaker phone, headset or hands-free car kit.

SUSE co-founder Hubert Mantel is back in the saddle at Novell. Back in November of 2005 when the well-respected chief maintainer of the SUSE Linux kernel left Novell, he said in an email announcing his resignation that, "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." One of the reasons some believed Mantel left Novell was because Novell briefly decided to support only GNOME as its one official desktop. The company quickly backed off this idea, but by then, Mantel had already left. Mandel was one of several SUSE senior staffers to leave Novell following the company’s acquisition of SUSE in January 2004.

The new year may bring resignations aplenty, as more than 75 percent of employees are currently looking for new jobs, according to a poll released Dec. 19 by the Society for Human Resource Management and The Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal.com. 2006 has already been a big year for losing workers. According to the HR professionals surveyed, on average, 12 percent of their organizations’ work forces has voluntarily resigned since the beginning of the year. While money took first place among reasons for employees jumping ship–cited by 30 percent of employees and 40 percent of HR professionals–opportunity for career advancement also appeared as a significant factor.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) is a dynamite technique for greatly enhancing the user experience on the Web. But it pays to remember that it’s only necessary because of the distance between the information source and the browser. Shorten that distance, and much of the need for Ajax goes away. This tutorial–the second in this series on Apache Derby database use–offers an alternate technique, one that allows reuse across several different environments.

They just don’t make malware like they used to. Or at least like they did earlier this year. Even low-quality malware, however, is taxing the resources of security companies, since it is being detected in ever-higher numbers. Over the past six months, the technical creativity of malware has fallen along with the ability to cause massive damage, such as that created by the MyDoom and Sasser worms of years past.

Opera Software, maker of the Opera Web browser, on Monday released the most recent update to the software, dubbed Opera 9.1, and it includes a new phishing filter. The browser’s phishing filter displays small warnings whenever users visit suspect sites that it thinks may attempt to steal a password or other confidential information.

The Computer History Museum, the world’s largest institution dedicated to preserving and presenting the artifacts and stories of the information age, says it will participate in a joint project with the Web History Center and the center’s other partners to preserve and make public the history of the World Wide Web. Formed in March 2006, the center’s mission is to identify and secure records from Web pioneers, companies and other sources to preserve the Web’s collective memory.