An interesting piece from CNET News Australia: a study from the Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation shows that open office floor plans, the ones where there’s no cube walls around workstations, lead to higher stress, and in turn can lead to higher frequency of illness for employees.
The high level [...]

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People that know me well enough can attest to my frequent and perhaps frustrating habit of not listening to voicemail.  My outgoing message usually says something along the lines of “please note, I do not listen to my voicemail, but here are the best ways to contact me…”
Please allow me to explain.  I hate [...]

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Apple announced DRM-free iTunes earlier this month at MacWorld, which in part means that tracks downloaded from iTunes will work on other players.  But there are still lots of details about the new DRM-free tracks to pay attention to.
Amongst them:  it costs money to transfer existing purchases to DRM-free tracks, you can’t choose to [...]

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Microsoft is still in the process of testing Office 14, which will likely coincide with the next release of Exchange Server.  Microsoft already offers a hosted version of Exchange 2007 for some customers, but the next release of Exchange Server, currently known as E14, will include improvements to make Exchange Server more suited for [...]

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Just earlier today I wrote about the SaaS hype curve hitting its peak.  In a report from InformationWeek, 52% of 1,300 developers said they expect to work on SaaS projects in 2009, with most developers working on SaaS implementations in North America.
Also of interest: cloud computing is expected to be less frequently used, with [...]

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The last few years have offered easy and exciting ways to demonstrate packaged software to customers.  One of the frustrating things, both as a prospective customer and a product manager, is getting a sandbox demonstration environment together (especially for complex not-available-through-SaaS types of software – which usually means most enterprise software available today).
First there [...]

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I’ve been paying more attention to the SaaS data portability space, especially since data portability in general is an important and currently undervalued area of enterprise software.
Here’s a round-up of three that I know of that focus on enterprise data (including Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft applications):

Jitterbit
Talend
SnapLogic

Of the three, Jitterbit is my favorite [...]

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