In an article published by iMedia Connection, Simms Jenkins of BrightWave Marketing examines how companies field responses to their email campaigns and discovers a glaring hole in their total email strategy as most companies failed to accept or reply to responses of their opt-in emails and newsletters.

Microsoft is trying to ensure that when daylight-saving time ends and Americans turn the clock back in the first week of November, the experience is seamless.

That was not the case on March 11, when daylight-saving time started three weeks earlier than usual. It will also end a week later than usual, on Nov. 4, as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended daylight-saving time by a month in the United States, and came into effect in 2007.

It took less than 24 hours for attackers to crank out proof-of-concept code targeting the one critical vulnerability disclosed–and patched–by Microsoft, security researchers warned.

Analysts with Symantec’s DeepSight threat network alerted customers that JavaScript exploit code for the critical vulnerability in Windows 2000 that was revealed in Microsoft’s monthly patch cycle. The proof-of-concept was posted to the Internet by someone with a Brazilian email address. An hour-and-a-half later, Symantec updated its alert to say that additional exploit code was also available to users of Immunity’s popular CANVAS penetration testing software.

The ExtraLabs Software company, a developer of software for creating RSS feeds, announced the new release of the Easy RSS Content Generator that has some new features improving the usability of the product. These new improvements take into account users’ most urgent needs.

Easy RSS Content Generator is an easy-to-use program for creating new unique content out of news feeds (the RSS, Atom, and RDF formats are supported). You can use this product, for instance, to create completely autonomous, automatically updated sites, to increase the amount of content on the topic, and to earn money with Adsense. Easy RSS Content Generator has a built-in FTP client, an automatic word replacement dictionary that will allow you to increase the uniqueness of the created pages, and a built-in tool for prompting keywords. You can use it to quickly search for RSS feeds and add them. No special knowledge is required, it is easy and comfortable to use the program.

Do you have to manage projects? If you do, you understand the complexity — and the stress. Michelle LaBrosse, a project manager with 20 years of experience, shows us how five simple tools can help make things much easier.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have significantly expanded their existing relationship in an agreement that makes Sun a Windows Server 2003 OEM that will sell, pre-install and support that server software across its entire server hardware line.

Windows Server 2003 will be available on Sun x64 systems within 90 days, and Sun will also provide other utilities and value-added software offerings to server systems carrying Windows Server, John Fowler, the executive vice president of Sun’s Systems Group, said at a media briefing on Sept. 12.

In just three years, the bytes of data generated by digital cameras, mobile phones, businesses IT systems, and devices will equal the number of grains of sand on the world’s beaches.

It’s a mind-boggling estimation from market analysis company IDC. But it reflects the proliferation of devices and systems used by consumers and businesses, said Stephen Minton, IDC’s vice president of worldwide IT markets and strategies, during a briefing on Thursday.

Over the next few years, corporations will face tough decisions on how to store data, find information and comply with regulations, said Minton, who laid out a forecast of what IT managers can expect from what’s being labeled the"information explosion."

Companies that outsource IT functions save between 12% and 17% of the cost of doing the work in-house, a new report from Forrester Research Inc. finds.

The savings take into account the expense of moving the work to an outside provider, advisor and legal fees, severance for any employees let go, taxes and ongoing management of the deal. Moreover, the discount is conservative, said Forrester analyst Paul Roehrig, because it does not factor in harder-to-quantify benefits that can be accrued in a good outsourcing deal.

Microsoft released documents that detail changes it will make to its desktop search and indexing feature in Windows Vista that will be included as part of the Vista Service Pack 1 update. The changes are a response to charges from rival Google that Microsoft built the feature in such a way that it slowed down competitive offerings from rivals.

Six years after the events of 9/11, many corporate IT operations are overconfident about their ability to handle a disaster, according to a Forrester Research, Inc. report released on Tuesday.

The survey of 189 data center decision makers found a severe lack of IT preparation for natural and manmade disasters.