As I was thinking about Mobile Device Management this morning, I was asking myself what the appropriate term was for technology that allows an enterprise to erase its data from an employee’s (or former employee’s) personal device. I started Googling terms like “Intelligent Kill Pill” and eventually came across the term “selective wipe.” More...

What a tangled web we weave, when at first we try to receive … content for a single web page from 150 different content servers. Maybe I am just noticing this more lately, given that the hard drive in my laptop is reaching capacity, but the web is becoming far too fragmented. One central tenet of convergence is that a single network platform can be used for voice, video, and data. 

As the web becomes more multimedia based, that means a single web page might be serving up HTML data from one server, a video advertisement from another, and a VoIP-based customer service chat box from yet another server—not to mention all the other mashed-up content on a typical page today. More...

Regular readers know I experiment with location-based technology quite often. Some time ago, I turned on Google Latitude in my Sprint EVO and started collecting data about my whereabouts. I looked at it all on a map and –  as opposed to being concerned about my privacy --  took solace in the fact that I would have a strong alibi if anyone needed to know my location on a certain date and time. That said, looking back over the past 30 days, I noticed some strange data on the map about places I had presumably been. More...

GigaOm recently released a free report, “Enterprise mobility perceptions among IT decision makers,” that examines cloud computing, big data, and enterprise mobility. The report highlights data collected by GigaOm from 304 enterprise IT decision makers.

The findings included an observation that, while 80 percent of all enterprises support mobile phones as part of their infrastructure, the size of the business seemed to have little impact on a company’s decision to support such mobility. The report also provides a glimpse into the market share for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows devices (I won’t spoil the suspense as I hope you’ll go grab your own copy of the report), as well as some insight into application support. More...

As much as I try to keep my blogs positive, I think I am entitled to a periodic rant once in a while. Today’s frustration is on the poor quality of what most online learning companies try to pass off as “computer-based training (CBT).”

I did a CCNA (Cisco-Certified Network Associate) self-study using CBT 10 years ago that was absolutely awesome. When I look at most of the CCNA self-study courses available today, they do not come close to the one I took a decade ago.  It is amazing that there are not more high-quality CBT programs for technology folks. While I understand that having an “expert” teaching in front of a whiteboard is the cheapest way to create CBT, the opportunity to massively increase the productivity of learning is totally missed by this approach.  More...

I have spent a lot of time talking about Unified Communications presence in this blog. Recently, I have been looking at the interoperability between Cisco and Microsoft deployments. At a high level, there is interoperability between the two platforms, with more to come for sure. More...

In David Hirschman’s post, “Why Do We Check In?,” he quotes the tweet of a social media professional: “I did not want to be mayor of my dentist’s office. Why did I even check in?” I have been trying to figure that out myself over the past year.

Last fall, I drafted a post about “checking in” that I never published here, as I just couldn't tie it in sufficiently.  But now I have a little better perspective on where the link is between “check-ins” and Unified Communications. Basically, a “check-in” is a piece of  presence information and is clearly part of the UC paradigm (yes, that is my smiling face on the Wikipedia page for “presence”). More...

One of the most underappreciated aspects of smartphones is the benefit of having a tool for both business and entertainment. In the early years, a dual enterprise/personal device was seen as a liability. Many companies even locked down business devices to prevent them from being used as entertainment devices. Today, however, companies have been forced by sheer momentum to integrate popular business/personal devices based on iOS and Android into their infrastructure. More...

Stacey Higginbotham penned a post at GigaOm entitled “Systems to handle big data might be this generation’s moon landing.”  Since it was posted on April 1, I asked myself if this was an April Fool’s Day joke as the comparison seemed a little farfetched; but then I realized the analogy was not about  the emotional significance of the first moon landing  but about the complexity of the problem Big Data is trying to solve. More...

One of the most expensive budget items in IT is the need to support a full-blown operating system on each and every desktop PC. Because every application installed on a given desktop can have a unique, unanticipated effect on that one device, the havoc that can be unleashed across the whole of the enterprise can sprout in an almost random, chaotic fashion. More...