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Social Responsibility's Strategic Benefits

December 15, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, for a discussion of how creating an organization that is socially responsible improves staffing, retention, leadership development and overall corporate health.

Working With and Communicating to Your Board of Directors

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CIO panelists who will share tips and experiences working with their boards: Twila Day of SYSCO; Jeff O'Hare, West Corp.; Marc West, formerly with H&R Block.

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Mid-market Council members will share their companies' stories and challenges in driving or coping with growth. Panelists represent Veterinary Pet Insurance, Medicis Pharmaceutical, and Intrax Cultural Exchange.

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Vista Deployment Secrets

Early adopters share lessons on how enterprise IT departments can get the most from Vista and how to deploy with minimal disruption.

 

February 08, 2008InfoWorld — Vista adoption in business has been slow (and at this writing more than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's petition asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available indefinitely). Nonetheless, thousands of businesses worldwide have already adopted Vista.

Some have made the move because they see real benefit to changes in the OS, especially for deployment management and security protection. Others see Vista as inevitable and would rather switch sooner than later. In either case, early adopters offer lessons on how to get the most from Vista and how to deploy with minimal disruption.

Such insight can only help the vast majority of businesses that are holding off on Vista. "The market has been slower to adopt Vista than lots of folks expected," notes Jeff Dimock, vice president of Microsoft solutions at the IT consultancy Dimension Data Americas. Gartner has advised its clients to wait until early 2009, to give Microsoft time to issue a couple of service packs and for third-party providers to update their applications and drivers, notes Michael Silver, a research vice president.

Both Dimock and Silver recommend that IT shops avoid installing Vista onto existing PCs unless they are less than a year old and instead pair a Vista upgrade with a hardware refresh. "We encourage customers to integrate these two cycles," Dimock says. The reasons are to confine the user and IT disruption and to avoid the performance and compatibility issues that older hardware can have with Vista.

When the time is right to move to Vista, Dimock expects IT organizations will like the tighter security, despite the fact it requires a change in both user behavior (to acknowledge the User Account Control warnings when installing potentially harmful applications) and an update in applications (to run in user mode rather than administrator mode). "It's a lot more robust security model, but it does come at a price," he says.

Dimock also sees the adoption of Vista as a handy excuse to clean out old apps from the IT portfolio, as many will no longer be fully compatible. "It is an ideal time to do that," he says.

For IT, perhaps the other big advantage is Vista's ability to create a unified installation image that selectively loads the needed drivers and applications onto users' computers -- saving IT from having to manage lots of install images as with XP or to rely on the PC-model-specific OEM installations whose "bloatware" then needs to be removed from each system.

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Infrastructure
» Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention
This report shows the findings of a recent Proofpoint and Forrester Consulting study on e-mail security, data loss prevention, and includes statistics on electronic risks.
» A Modern Approach to On-Demand Email and Data Security
Learn how Proofpoint delivers a dedicated, hosted e-mail security solution that combines state-of-the-art anti-spam and virus control.
» A Proactive Approach to e-Discovery
Learn about the key e-discovery challenges facing legal and IT departments today and how businesses can develop an e-mail archiving strategy to deal with e-discovery requests.
» The Advantages of Identity Based Encryption
Download this paper to learn why e-mail encyrption is critical to an organization's overall security architecture and the advantages of identity-based encryption.
» Global Best Practices in Email Security, Privacy and Compliance
This whitepaper discusses the latest global regulations that impact the e-mail security policies and strategies of today's enterprises, universities and government organizations.
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