The News Review:
- Metastorm Selected to Participate in Microsoft Business Process…
- No NZ rush to ffice 2007
- ffice 2007 offers nifty improvements
- Get Healthy’”r Else
- Penetration tests measure firms’ security
Metastorm Selected to Participate in Microsoft Business Process…
Free with registration – PR Newswire – AccessMyLibrary.com – Feb 26, 2007
0 for human-centric tasks. The Microsoft Business Process Alliance is designed to enhance business process enablement on the Microsoft platform and provides a way for customers to identify companies that have proven their commitment and expertise in one or more specialized areas of BPM that add further value to Microsoft technologies. Metastorm is one of the premier vendors in this select community that offers a proven enterprise-scale BPM suite that serves as a complete platform for organizations. CPYRIGHT 2007 PR Newswire Association LLC.
No NZ rush to ffice 2007
zdnet.com.au – Feb 26, 2007
Telecom’s business manager for enabling collaboration Hugh McKellar told ZDNet Australia he was excited by the “great functionality” within ffice 2007. “It’s a really good logical development for Microsoft. The utlook voice access is a cool feature [as are] the enhancements around the whole calendar and contact list and so on and integration with the other Microsoft applications” McKellar said. “We certainly see advantage in being aligned with very strong partners. We look to a global standard in the first instance and those [Vista and ffice 2007] would be our base level applications that we would look to take to market as services and solutions. But then we can add a strong local flavour to that around service and support… But one enthusiast already running his small Wellington-based international consultancy firm on a Vista and ffice 2007 platform is Guinness Gallagher executive director Shaan Stevens. Stevens said on top of Vista’s added security features — which were a godsend for someone like himself who was prone to losing laptops while travelling — the productivity enhancements within ffice 2007 were saving him significant time during the course of the working day. He said the new version of utlook’s ability to preview attachments its added CRM functions and a more intuitive interface for Excel and PowerPoint as examples.
ffice 2007 offers nifty improvements
Denver Post – Feb 26, 2007
ffice 2007 was released on the same day. Like Vista ffice 2007 offers significant improvements. Some of my favorites: The ffice Ribbon ffice 2007 has a beautiful new look. At the heart of the new look is the ffice Ribbon… ffice 2007 features Live Preview. You can preview a change to your document without applying the change. For example in Word Excel or PowerPoint select a portion of the text. n the Home Ribbon click the arrow beside the font name. As you move your mouse over the list of fonts the selected text changes. Because the preview is instantaneous formatting is easy. Live Preview is especially helpful with Word’s Styles formatting feature.
Get Healthy’”r Else
BusinessWeek – Feb 26, 2007
The CE got right to the point: We were boneheaded he told the crowd. Then again Hagedorn wanted employees to know what he was up against. Using a PowerPoint presentation he showed that his annual health-care bill had soared 42% since 1999 to $20 million which amounted to 20% of the company’s net profits in 2003. Costs were projected to surge about 20% that year vs. the national average of 9% and keep on climbing at a double-digit rate. Toward the end of the talk a young plant worker stood up and scolded Hagedorn. “You guys on the other side of the street you got fancy financial advisers” he said.
Penetration tests measure firms’ security
computerweekly.com – Feb 26, 2007
Techniques such as dumpster diving are common in which testers search through rubbish to find useful snippets of information (do you know where the hard copies of your server logs are?). Searching newsgroups for information about the company can yield results and Google is a useful tool for those that know how to use it. The “site” prefix (for searching within a particular web domain) and the “filetype” prefix (useful for searching for say Microsoft Access files utlook databases or systems administration scripts) can sometimes yield useful results – as can metadata gleaned from documents retrieved from a company’s website. The target scanning phase lets the penetration tester assess the size of what Haagman calls the company’s “attack surface”. The greater the number of attackable points in the system (public IP addresses for example) the more opportunities there are for a tester to get in. Identifying potential doorways into a system leads to a vulnerability assessment in which the attacker rattles them to see how vulnerable they are. Security testing tools from companies such as Nessus are useful here because they can automate the process identifying weak points in identifiable parts of the company’s infrastructure… Using exploits in ffice and other applications can give testers a way into a company he said. “People are filtering out. exe files sent via e-mail but everyone lets Word and Powerpoint files through” he said adding that the main danger now concerns flaws in the client code rather than macro viruses. Buffer overflows are only one kind of exploit that can be generated by sending properly configured documents. “I wonder whether people are really testing their workstations and proxy servers against these kinds of attacks” said Pope. The danger from poorly written or configured applications is linked directly to unprotected inner defences. A company may spend thousands of pounds securing the edge of its network and pay little attention to the infrastructure within.