Microsoft to turn , Outlook a Social Networking !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wednesday was a good day for Google’s enterprise software business as competitor Microsoft announced plans to incorporate Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn updates within its flagship enterprise product, Outlook.

The move could get Outlook banned in offices around the world by buttoned-down IT folks bound by corporate policy, who now have reason turn their school-marm firewall rules on Microsoft Outlook. And those who love their e-mail pure of distracting Web 2.0 noise might be tempted to turn to Gmail’s enterprise edition — which as yet has no Buzz inside.

Microsoft dominates the market for enterprise office productivity tools, but has come under increasing pressure from online innovators like Google and Zoho that offer businesses decent alternatives at significant discounts.

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What Google needs to learn from Buzz backlash

G oogle may have reached the limits of what it can learn from dog food.

Ask almost any technology company what products and services they use within their own organizations, and most will enthusiastically admit to "dog-fooding" their own products. It's both a show of support for their own technology and an opportunity to test those products for flaws that won't make the light of day before they are fixed.

Google is no different. But something went wrong with the dog-fooding process for Google Buzz, forcing company engineers to scramble over a holiday weekend to calm the outcry over privacy violations with tweaks to the settings and set-up process.  more.........

Cisco patches multiple holes in its security products

The bad news is that Cisco today warned customers of multiple holes in its security products. The good news is that it has released patches for all of them. Affected products include he Cisco Firewall Services Module (FWSM) for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches and Cisco 7600 routers, Cisco ASA 5500 security appliance and Cisco Security Agent releases 5.1, 5.2 and 6.0 and the Cisco PIX 500.
The FWSM vulnerability may cause a denial of service. The Cisco FWSM may be forced to reload after processing an evil Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP) message. The vulnerability exists when SCCP inspection is enabled. It is only triggered by transit traffic not by traffic destined for the device. more........

Microsoft to Talk Open Source at OSBC

Microsoft will be active at the Open Source Business Conference, acting as a sponsor and providing a keynote speaker. The software giant is continuing its drive to position itself as an ally of open source and to support open-source projects on Windows.

Microsoft plans to make a substantial showing at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference, in a continuation of the software giant's campaign to make nice with open source and support open-source projects on Windows.

In a blog post, Peter Galli, open-source community manager at Microsoft, laid out some of what the company will do at the OSBC event that runs March 17 to 18 in San Francisco.

For starters, Microsoft will be a Platinum sponsor of the event and will call on one of its emerging stars to keynote. Stuart McKee, Microsoft's national technology officer for the United States, will deliver a keynote on March 18. more........

Open Source MySQL Backup Application: Sypex Dumper

Sypex Dumper is an open source web application for creating instant or automated backups of MySQL databases.
It is built with PHP, has an Ajaxed interface & can restore databases as well.
The application can work with gb-level huge databases as it easily bypasses the timeout limits of PHP by pausing/starting backup jobs.

Sypex Dumper can optionally check, optimize & repair tables or automatically delete older backups to save space.
It has support for file compression (Gzip and Bzip2) & offers a multilingual interface more.........

Oops! Google Says 'We're Very Sorry' for the Big Buzz Blunder

Google (GOOG) moved to stem the growing privacy furor over its new Buzz social networking product on Saturday, announcing that new users would no longer automatically follow and be followed by the email contacts in their Gmail accounts.

Google integrated Buzz, introduced on Feb. 9, into its Gmail service, and many users were shocked to discover that their private contacts were broadcast publicly. The episode is an embarrassment for Google, which many privacy advocates already view skeptically.

The central issue in the Buzz case is that new users were automatically set up with a publicly displayed social network culled from their contact lists. Incredibly, Google saw no problem with turning personal email correspondents into the basis of a public social network.  more........