Alternatives to Second Life provide security while boosting productivity Meetings, conferences and training programs in a 3D virtual world such as Second Life can be more engaging and productive than traditional online sessions and phone calls, and much less expensive than face-to-face meetings requiring travel. But some companies aren’t willing to take on the security and compliance risks of using a public platform and are instead opting for private virtual worlds created behind the corporate firewall. Read full article in CIO. … Read more »

Originally published in CIO Magazine OppenheimerFunds used to have a data entry efficiency problem. Address changes that customers made on its website had to be manually re-entered into a variety of back-end systems before they went into effect. “Our business was growing — that was the good news,” said Geoff Youell, the firm’s assistant vice president of architecture. But due to the integration issues, the record keeping side wasn’t scaling very well. “There was a lot of retyping the same information multiple times into legacy systems,” he said. Read full article. … Read more »

This article originally appeared in CIO magazine. As China prepares to become a full member of the World Trade Organization, the Beijing government is trying to prove to the West that it is serious about reducing software piracy. And so China’s government agencies and businesses are turning to Linux as their desktop operating system of choice, a trend with potential to influence how the world uses the open-source software. Recently Linux has become increasingly popular as a server operating system but has been slower to catch on at the desktop due to the difficulties IT departments have finding or developing enterprise-quality Linux desktop applications. According to Gartner, only about 1 percent of companies in the United States and Europe currently use Linux on the desktop, and only 3.2 percent are expected to … Read more »