A few years ago, Nicholas Carr (a former editor of Harvard Business Review) set the cat among st the pigeons with his thought-provoking book – Does IT Matter . With this book , Nicholas Carr forced us to re-examine some of our most basic assumptions about...

Now that I have your attention with that rather sensationalist headline, let me explain: Tayside Fire & Rescue is one of eight fire authorities in Scotland, providing emergency services to over 400,000 people in an area covering 7000 square kilometres...

Back in September I did promise to run a Live Meeting (webcast) on the first Tuesday of every month between 10:00-11:00 on a technology topic of relevance to the Public Sector. Next month, because of a clash of commitments, I need to make the Live Meeting...

My thanks to my colleague, Ray Fleming, in the Microsoft Education team for keeping us posted on the latest news from the Microsoft IT Forum in Barcelona this week. While Ray has been working hard in the Spanish sunshine, the reality of winter has begun...

Yes, I know you might still think of SQL 2005 as a new product, but SQL 2008 is nearly with us and there are many reasons why people are looking to upgrade.  There was a useful session at IT Forum which looked at the release of SQL 2008, and explored...

There's a phrase - "Enterprise Search" - which summarises the next step in effective use of technologies for collaboration, data sharing and making your institutional memory more accessible. By this I mean, when anybody in your organisation...

" The value in virtualisation technology moving forward will be in the management and the operating system rather than in the virtualisation stack." I attended an interesting session at IT Forum today from Guillaume Field, from Dell.  He...

In a recent survey, 70% of (male) drivers said that their driving skills were "above average". Which tells you that most people think that they are better drivers than the others on the road. Well, PC security is probably like this - most users...

Vinny Guloto, General Manager for the Malware Protection Centre, presented today on the work that the centre is putting into the world of threat research, and both reactive and proactive response. One of the interesting slides that Vinny used was about...

I'm at the IT Forum event this week - it's a week long tech-fest about current and future technologies from Microsoft. This year's event has 5,200 delegates and we're all sitting in a conference centre on the shores of Mediterranean in Barcelona ( not...

It is not so many years ago that the words Microsoft and security were seen as a contradiction in terms by many IT professionals. How times have changed. Initiated in 2002, the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing programme has been instrumental in putting...

You might think it is odd for a software company to encourage you to spend less on your IT. Bear with me. Take a look at this recommendation from Gartner that Directors of ICT should create a recession budget for IT . Although the focus of this recommendation...

Allegedly, rule #1 of the six sigma process improvement methodology is ‘steal shamelessly all non-proprietary and non-copyrighted ideas’. That is my excuse for turning once again to my colleagues who produce the Microsoft NHS Resource Centre for today...

You might think that in a company that has wall-to-wall SharePoint Server collaboration solutions for information sharing and document management that information silos would be a thing of the past. But no, they still exist. Much like that scene at the...

The next Microsoft Live Meeting for the Public Sector, on the topic of Building the Dynamic Data Centre, takes place on Tuesday November 6 th from 10:00 – 11:00 . With a large amount of data centre consolidation taking place within local and regional...