Stories by: Doug Dineley

Every year InfoWorld painstakingly selects its Bossie Award winners -- the best open source software for business -- and every year we have shamefully neglected the very cream of the open source crop. While we've awarded the Dojos, Xens, and SugarCRMs, we've ignored Linux, GNU, and the *BSDs -- because, well, don't their excellence and importance go without saying? In other cases, where open source giants did receive our award (Snort and Wireshark come to mind), a "mere" Bossie almost seems like faint praise.

Users love the iPhone, but IT does not. The biggest complaints: The iPhone can't be managed for security and access policies like a BlackBerry can. Businesses can buy a BlackBerry Enterprise Server or Motorola Good for Enterprise server to manage user profiles over the air, ensuring that users conform to password policies, encryption policies, app-installation restrictions, and so on, as well as have their e-mail, VPN, and other settings preconfigured to reduce hands-on deployment effort.

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that's the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn't it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

Bill Gates didn't see much of Steve Ballmer anymore, now that Bill was skipping most of the board meetings. But when they met they'd share a good laugh. After all, although things went pretty much according to plan, they never imagined the company would reach such a peak. Good ol' MSFT was now bigger, in terms of market cap, than any company in the US. If it weren't for the Chinese banks, they'd be kings of the world.

Today in Los Angeles -- and in a "launch wave" of events across the globe -- Microsoft's long-awaited unveiling of Windows Server 2008 (WS08) reaches its dizzying crescendo. At the same time, Microsoft celebrates two other milestones: the release of Visual Studio 2008, which arrived in November, and the forthcoming release of SQL Server 2008, which is due in Q3.

For managers of enterprise datacenters, the endless stream of security patches from Microsoft, Oracle, and other software vendors (not to mention open source projects) has been a prime source of frustration. For Blue Lane Technologies, it has provided a golden opportunity.

Adobe LiveCycle 7.0 brings to fruition Adobe Systems' May 2004 acquisition of Q-Link Technologies, maker of Java-based business process management software. Finally incorporating Q-Link's component-based workflow engine into Adobe's Intelligent Document Platform, LiveCycle 7.0 promises not only to streamline PDF-based workflows, but also to extend document-centric processes to back-end systems and to users and systems outside the firewall. The revamped process management suite now also includes BAM (business activity monitoring) capabilities, allowing end-users to configure thresholds and alerts, and to keep an eye on key performance indicators through Web-based dashboards.