Beta Not for Business

There are a lot of things that are true about businesses but probably the truest is that businesses love to use things that aren't considered fully ready for use.

For example, companies love to hire people who admit that they aren't ready to do their jobs effectively. And they also love to locate themselves in buildings that are not yet completely built. And most of all, businesses love run their vital business processes on products that haven't been officially released and are still considered incomplete.

OK, I know what some of you are thinking. Are you nuts Jim? Companies don't want to hire people who aren't ready to do their jobs. And no company would take the risk to move into a building that isn't considered ready for occupation.

All right, I'll give you those two. But I've been seeing more and more companies willing to use products that are officially marked as unready, and more and more vendors willing to sell them these unready products.

What are these incomplete products? They are of course betas of applications and products.

The Powering of the Green

With St. Patrick's day approaching, we'll all soon be seeing lots of green (green shirts, green decorations, green beer). But here at eWEEK, one area that we would like to see be a lot more green is our IT data center (in fact, stay tuned for more on that from us). At the recent MIT Energy Conference, I got to see some of both the latest shipping products designed to both lower power and gas consumption and to help run homes and businesses more efficiently. Along with the cool new hybrids, batteries, solar reflectors and renewable power sources, there was this cool project that creates hydrogen using algae. Click here to see the all of my pictures from the MIT Energy Conference....

Sweat the Small Stuff for Daylight-Saving Change

With the accelerated daylight-saving change approaching this week, many businesses and IT users probably feel pretty secure that they have done everything necessary to protect themselves from any problems that the daylight-saving change will cause. They've read articles like eWEEK Labs' advice on how to update enterprise applications and systems to be ready for the time change. So everything should be hunky dory, right? But what about all of the little things that you might be forgetting? For example, how about all of the smart phones and PDAs that your staff (and especially executives) are using? Modern phones basically have operating systems themselves and if phones aren't updated, those updates you made to your Exchange server still won't stop the boss from missing his key meetings. So make sure that you check and update all of your cell phones such as your Palm Treos, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices. And...