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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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Windows 7: The Five Most Talked-About Features

From less annoying security prompts to an improved taskbar, here's a look at the five features of Windows 7 generating the most discussion and what they'll mean to you.

Revamped User Account Control

Vista's well-intentioned security feature UAC (User Account Control), perhaps the operating system's most despised feature, became an easy target for Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads. Users were driven nuts by UAC's frequent pop-up prompts seeking confirmation before allowing programs to open.

In Windows 7, Microsoft gives more control over UAC to the user, so there will be fewer prompts. If the user makes any of the changes that Vista has been prompting, such as changing the date or time, Windows 7 will leave it alone.

In his review of the Windows 7 pre-beta, Computerworld's Preston Gralla commends the improvements made to UAC. "It rarely gets in your way—you get a prompt only when a program tries to make changes to your PC. If you make them yourself, it allows you to go ahead."

With Windows 7, Microsoft has dropped the "on or off only" approach of Vista and made UAC customizable.

There will now be four settings: Never notify; only notify me when programs try to make changes to my computer; always notify me; always notify me and wait for my response.

Improved Taskbar

Microsoft's new Windows 7 taskbar was demonstrated at the company's recent Professional Developers Conference, but was not part of the pre-beta software handed out to attendees. Still, and probably because it's not included in the pre-beta, it's one of the most-discussed features.

Based on screenshots from the PDC demo, the new Taskbar has been given an overhaul. It does look notably similar to the Mac OS X dock, but reportedly includes unique enhancements such as the ability to display all running programs in a thumbnail list.

If you hover over a thumbnail with the mouse, its full-size window will appear on the screen. In addition, mousing over a thumbnail turns other windows transparent to reveal the window you selected.

Large icons in the Taskbar will launch programs, and you can rearrange the icons however you like. The Quick Launch bar of Vista will cease to exist and be incorporated into the Taskbar.