1. "EMC Promises Common Management Platform,"
May 23. Network World

Hallelujah choruses could be heard from IT departments that deal with multiple EMC storage lines as the company said it will offer a common platform for management of lines by the end of the year and into next. Symmetrix, Clariion, Centera and Celerra "will converge to a common user interface," EMC Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer Mark Lewis said in an interview at the company's user conference. Users expressed doubts that EMC can deliver on what it promised since all of the server lines have "completely different architectures." The reason for separate management silos is that customers wanted to use EMC wares in different ways, Lewis said.

2. "Post Va. Tech, Campus CIOs Face Demands to Boost Communications,"
May 24, Computerworld

As a consequence of last month's massacre at Virginia Tech, IT managers at universities and colleges are under pressure to figure out how to communicate quickly with students when there are emergencies on campus. Jay Dominick, CIO at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., says he has been in "constant meetings" since the April 16 shootings that left 33 dead, including the gunman. He noted that while Virginia Tech officials were "pilloried" in the aftermath of the shooting spree for taking two and a half hours to communicate about the emergency, that response actually constituted "a great job" in his opinion. Many campuses have no processes in place to communicate about emergencies with thousands of students and staff, he said. But that situation is rapidly changing.

3. "Microsoft Opens Up Its Identity Management E-Wallet,"
May 23, Computerworld

Microsoft's Identity Selector Interoperability Profile technology is available free under the company's Open Specifications Promise, it said the week after stirring the open-source community into agitation with its assertion that open-source users and developers are infringing on 235 of its patents. Microsoft makes some of its technology specifications available through the OSP for open use with the pledge that it won't assert patent claims on those technologies. Identity Selector technology securely stores the personal information of end users. The aim of releasing it for open use is to give software developers another way to provide for more secure websites and surfing.

4. "New Antiphishing, Antispam Specifications Unveiled,"
May 23, Computerworld.

The Internet Engineering Task Force published specifications for a new antiphishing and antispam e-mail authentication tool. DomainKeys Identified Mail combines some existing methods to fight phishing and spam for better sorting and identification of legitimate e-mail. DKIM adds a digital signature tied to the organization's domain name, so that the traditional IP address of senders isn't the only identifier used. The specification is available for use now by independent software vendors and e-mail service providers.