IT Week Insider, Volume 10, Number 5

The Insider offers a round up of key stories from the upcoming edition of IT Week

Welcome to the IT Week Insider

This week Tesco.com stopped delivering groceries and started sending writs, so the monkeys are having to exist on a diet of begrudged praise and old sandwiches. They don’t like it.

This is bad news for us, since an unhappy monkey is a biting, scratching, screeching monkey. But this is probably not news to you – we expect most firms have had the sense to avoid importing an infinite number of hair-faced troublemakers as cheap labour, but it did come as some surprise to us.

Still, the chain-mail pants and stapler-proof visors finally turned up this week – hooray for the internet – so at least moving around the office is a bit more bearable. With any luck some of the monkeys might leave a crust or two for us as well, though we doubt it.

Anyway. You gotta be hungry for success to be successful, and there’s no doubt - we are very hungry.

News:

Michael Dell back in the hot seat as CEO quits
Probably not unrelated to market share as robust as a Dell laptop keyboard, Dell has decided to aim a swift kick up the backside of its chief executive. A kick hard enough to boot him out of a job, in fact. The firm has replaced ex-chief Kevin “I’ll get my coat” Rollins with founder Michael “ding dong” Dell, who apparently has some experience in running firms called Dell.

More news:

Synchronica to push email to low cost phones
Device and server management tools provider Sychronica is to merge its two device management tools and revamp its middleware server to support push delivery of email to low-cost phones. Sadly this means that no more will a lack of hardware upgrade be an excuse for you to totally avoid work on those “work from home” days.

This is also news:

Oracle set to tackle licensing nightmare
This has nothing to do with mis-managed television watching rights at Oracle’s less-than-glamorous UK HQ, but a lot to do with its software licences, which presumably are as troublesome to most IT managers as an itchy burning sensation in the baby-making area. Apparently Oracle is going to sort things out at its end. Perhaps you ought to get some cream for yours.

Comment:

Magnifier reveals accessibility flaws
This week Phil Muncaster went and had a good look at a new web accessibility tool (probably the first time anyone has ever done that). On the surface, he thinks, it’s a good idea that might be adopted by many firms. However, Phil adds that a quick fix won’t solve the underlying problems of sites that are about as welcoming to disabled people as a steep staircase strewn with tintacks.

Analysis:

Anyone can be a webmaster
Lawrence Flynn is chief executive of web content management specialist Mediasurface. He reckons that anyone can be a webmaster. Oh yeah? Well we reckon that anyone can be chief executive of web content management specialist Mediasurface. Whaddya have to say about that?

IT Week Podcast
Audio analysis of the week’s events. This week Daniel Robinson talks about the recent Vista release and its hardware implications, while David Neal and Madeline Bennett discuss how open documents should be.

Lem Bingley blog
This week Lem is going on and on and on about Google. It won’t get you any share options Lem, but keep on trying.

IT Week Labs blog
Microsoft Vista launched this week and the labs people were there to watch some video of it in a darkened room some way away from the launch itself.

Green Business NewsRising like a phoenix out of the ashes... Hmm. That doesn’t quite work. Emerging from the ashes of recycled Christmas cards like slightly grey toilet paper comes the IT Week Green Business News blog. Yup. Much better.

IT Sneak blog
Sneak has been reading other people’s blogs this week, while doing his own blogging. Soon people will start to wonder how he manages to do his other work. Oh. He has no... Ah never mind.

Phil Muncaster blog
So, this week we left Phil at the mercy of Gartner’s BI Symposium. What has he done to deserve such treatment? Oh. He did what? And then what? Oh my...

David Neal blog
David Neal on why kids should stay in and play computer games, as opposed to going outside and making their own.