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Works In Progress

Is The Patch Situation Getting Any Better?

John Foley, George V. Hulme, and Charles Babcock are looking at patch management. Oracle is joining Microsoft in sending out monthly patch updates. Also, Microsoft is releasing XP SP 2, the biggest patch ever, and analysts are advising companies to wait a couple of months before upgrading--it's already causing numerous apps to break. The tres amigos will look into whether companies have a handle on patch management.

Spam War From The DMA’s Point Of View
The Direct Marketing Association has acknowledged that John Law is going after spammers. Thomas Claburn says that the DMA expects several arrests and indictments to be announced at a Department of Justice press conference Thursday in Washington, D.C. The DMA also learned that several of these arrests are the result of Operation SLAM Spam, a public/private alliance between the FBI and the DMA, which devoted significant funds and resources to the operation.

Better Than HTML
Macromedia now has an integrated development environment for producing Web features that are richer and more interactive than those found on HTML pages, reports Charles Babcock. Macromedia is one of the vendors best able to push the rich client.

Its Flex Builder development environment, for example, would be good for building a call-center application that pulls customer information together from multiple sources to improve service. Flex Builder would also be useful for building executive or customer dashboards, where users get to see a variety of information in a visual form that makes it most readily understandable. The Flex Builder style interface can be frequently updated automatically, or updated at user request, more quickly than an HTML-type interface. ASPs, such as Salesforce.com and Grand Central, use another version of the rich client--not Macromedia’s--to increase their position in the market. The travel industry has been a heavy user of rich clients because of its complicated user interactions.

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