Michael Osterman
IT budgets for 2009
We have just wrapped up two major surveys of organizational decision makers - one with midsized and large organizations and the other with small to midsized businesses. Included in the surveys for both groups were the following...
Some predictions for 2009
Lots of people offer predictions at this time of year. Not to be left out of the plethora of voices offering their predictions for 2009, here are my educated guesses as to what we'll see in the new year:
Are your e-mail policies adequate?
We have just published a major study on messaging policy management among midsized and large organizations. One of the key findings of the study was that only about one-third of organizations have what they consider to be a detailed...
A hard disk failure puts critical business information at risk
I had an interesting discussion recently with DriveSavers, one of the leading hard disk recovery firms in North America. We talk a lot about messaging, collaboration and unified messaging systems holding most of the critical business...
Moving on from Network World
I have been writing for Network World newsletters since late 1999 when I was vice-president of market research for Creative Networks, one of the leading market research and consulting firms in the messaging space at that time. After...
Managing processes more effectively
E-mail is a fantastic tool for communicating with others, sending and receiving files (albeit with limitations) and managing personal tasks. E-mail is less useful for things like managing projects, particularly when multiple people...
Unified communications and the economic slowdown
An economic slowdown is an interesting phenomenon. While there are some structural elements of a slowdown that are real, much of a slowdown is a self-fulfilling prophecy: people are afraid of their economic future so they slow...
The spam problem was mostly solved last Tuesday
Well, not really. But spam volumes dropped dramatically on Nov. 11 as a result of McColo being taken offline by its two primary ISPs, Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing. IronPort, for example, reported that monthly spam volumes in...
Would you pay $1 million for an archiving system?
The mayor of Detroit resigned his position in September, his chief of staff resigned in January and the mayor will be spending four months in jail. Part of what precipitated these events was a wrongful termination lawsuit brought by...
CMIS promises easier information sharing
Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) has been proposed as a standard by IBM, Microsoft and EMC as a way of using Web services for sharing content between a variety of content repositories. While the process of turning...
Internet censorship effort raises big questions
The Australian federal government has announced that it will establish compulsory censorship of Internet traffic, with trials starting by the end of the year. The censorship proposal originally included an opt-out provision that would...