Microsoft Office 365 will soon become more collaborative, specializing in relevant content to present a more personalized work experience. Microsoft In 2013: 7 Lessons Learned (Click image for larger view and for slideshow.) Microsoft kicked off its SharePoint 2014 conference on Monday with a preview of recent Office 365 technologies designed to make the cloud-based productivity suite more collaborative and cohesive. Users openly share information on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social platforms, but at work, the experience tends to not be like that, Office GM Julia White told InformationWeek in an interview. She said Microsoft wants its new products to “cut in the course of the noise” by specializing in a customized experience that recognizes the user’s current needs and automatically surfaces relevant content. Microsoft’s plans hinge on Office Graph, which was introduced Monday and gives an “intelligence fabric” that runs within the background, constantly analyzing content and mapping relationships. A forthcoming application codenamed Oslo can be one of the products that rely upon... Read More »

SSA issues request for info seeking software that might help automate the agency’s IT processes and create a self-service portal. 6 Cool Apps From Uncle Sam (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The Social Security Administration (SSA) desires to build an on-premises private cloud, and it’s trying to find software packages that may help the agency do a closer job of using its existing infrastructure and automate processes which are currently done manually.  SSA has asked interested vendors to reply with products that meet its requirements in a request for info, posted on Jan. 14. The SSA said the responses provided by vendors would help the agency determine current market capabilities for building an individual cloud. The “desired software” could be integrated into the SSA’s VMware server virtualization infrastructure to “create a self-service virtual machine (VM) provisioning portal, automate common administrative tasks like VM creation, recoup unused resources, and infrastructure maintenance tasks,” the agency said within the RFI. The... Read More »

Here are a couple of ways: Build an enterprise app store, gamify your organization, and support as much consumer technology as possible. It’s tough being a CIO today. There are pressures from all corners to run, expand, and transform the business. CIOs have hunkered down able of protectionism for a few years. They’ve struggled to embrace the millennial era of computing and supply their employees and customers with the applications and tools they should really compete. [ Seeking to hire millennials? See How To draw Young Talent: 10 Tips. ] For instance, in coping with the BYOD movement, many CIOs are still fighting the notion of letting employees integrate their devices into the company IT infrastructure. Here’s making a big divide between the CIOs and employees who long for a similar productivity and connection of their work lives that they get from their personal lives. The long run expectations of a CIO might be in becoming a mobility architect or mobility integration specialist as she or... Read More »

DevOps Automation Service lets a development team rapidly expand its development infrastructure without taking up more systems management tasks. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (click image for larger view) Platform-as-a-service is a battleground for firms that like to help customers build next-generation applications for deployment within the cloud. Cloud providers Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft, and others say their sorts of PaaS can assist development teams move toward a DevOps-form of software implementation. Rackspace is coming from the wrong way, saying its support team has the ops expertise to assist developers move projects toward worry-free development and deployment operations. Thursday, Rackspace announced DevOps Automated Service, which could provide automated operations on-premises, as a service from Rackspace, or as a hybrid operation. In short, Rackspace is making an attempt to increase its DevOps technical-support expertise to a customer’s preferred site to automate development operations. That may be Xen or KVM virtual machines at the Rackspace public cloud, or it’d be simply the virtualized component to the customer’s own... Read More »

The big data community needs better app development tools, no more Hadoop whizzes, says Continuuity’s CEO. 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) “Big data for the loads” is a well-liked rallying cry among those that see the complexity of Hadoop and related tools as an impediment to an information-driven nirvana. a contemporary Wikibon survey of giant data vendors and repair providers shows that companies’ technical staff often lack the educational to cope the notoriously complex Hadoop effectively. But in preference to training more Hadoop experts, enterprises should specialize in convalescing tools to aid their developers build big data apps, says Jonathan Gray, CEO and cofounder of Continuuity, a two-year-old startup with an app development platform designed specifically for Hadoop. The Palo Alto, Calif., company has 30 employees, two-thirds of whom are engineers. “We’re a Hadoop-focused company. What makes us different from everyone else is that we’re a developer-focused company,” Gray told InformationWeek in a phone interview. “We’ve built... Read More »