Getting more out of Fusion

How do you keep up to date on network technologies and issues? Step 1, of course, is right in your hands. But when you want to get up to speed on a specific technology or topic, chances are you head to the Web.

Over the past few months, we’ve been busy upgrading our topic-specific research centers on Network World Fusion  to make them even more useful. Each center features the latest breaking news and analysis on the topic, of course. But you also can turn to them for enterprise-specific tutorials and white papers – nearly 1,200 at last count – along with the latest downloadable applications (more than 500). And we’ve built a networking encyclopedia to define key terms. Follow the links from the relevant research centers or start browsing our links area.

Most of our research-center pages now have “XML” buttons that let you subscribe to a daily feed of the latest news and analysis via the XML subset known as RSS. We currently have 60 different RSS feeds.

It’s all been a team effort: All of our reporters are now responsible for research-center pages in their beats, and they write a weekly analysis or point to an interesting new product or topic.

For example, Senior Editor John Cox looks at a spate of recent reports on the wireless market and concludes that people are going to remain tethered for a long, long time: “The ‘Wireless Revolution’ is still and will be forever a mirage.” Senior Editor Ellen Messmer, meanwhile, recently wrote what you could learn from a critical review of a large federal e-commerce effort.

When you get right down to it, though, who knows networks better than you and your peers? That’s why we’re also making our resources interactive. When Senior Editor Deni Connor noticed there aren’t that many places for storage professionals to discuss their issues, she set up a storage community forum  – where users now are discussing the pros and cons of intelligent Fibre Channel switches (this is in addition to our existing forums, on topics from VPNs to the future of NetWare).

And starting this week, you can let your peers know what you think of all those resources we’ve listed – each now has a “review” button that lets you post comments for your peers to read, and for you to read what others have to say.

Take a look, and let us know what you think.