The itmWEB Information Technology Report

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A monthly report featuring selected IT topics and time sensitive links.

Volume 2, Number 7, August 1998

ISSN: 1099-8411

Welcome to the 19th distribution of the itmWEB Information Technology Report. This month's edition is being distributed worldwide to 1,042 IT professionals and associates. You are receiving this report because you either requested it from one of the sites above, or you have been referred to the email list as having a potential interest. itmWEB's policy is not to SPAM. The itmWEB report is a non-commercial, professional resource, and care is taken to only send the report to interested readers.

Please find instructions for unsubscribing at the end of this report.

Please send comments or contributions to: feedback@itmweb.com

CONTENTS:

1. The itmWEB Report / Upfront Links
2. Product News
3. Jeff Gainer's Critical Path
4. IT Management Quickies
5. Bug, Virus, & Hacker Alerts
6. Random Bits & Bytes
7. Selected IT Resources

It only took twenty months, but we finally made it - over 1,000 subscribers! 1,042 to be exact. My thanks to all of you who have been readers of the report from the beginning and stayed with it. As a subscriber, you are now part of a very powerful group in the IT the world. Over fifty percent of this list are top IT managers - a number in countries outside the U.S. An important group of well known IT authors also receive the itmWEB report. Site founders from many of the very best technology websites have subscribed. All in all, this is a very distinguished, select group.

Fall is upon us, and universities around the world are greeting their returning students. Many of these students will be able to access sophisticated campus networks with connections straight to their professor's class notes, to the central library, and to the WWW, all from the comfort of their dorm rooms. Quite a difference from my days of feeding punch cards to the mainframe in the Mathematics building basement at Oklahoma State!

Thanks to Apple, some of these returning students may be bringing new iMacs. This is an important moment for Apple - read about it here:

The iMac: Apple Matters Again
http://mis.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa080898.htm

This month I have spent time focusing on the big IT news and on the accumulation of Bug, Virus, & Hacker Alerts issued over the last two months. I was staggered. Before you delete the report, make sure you read Section 5. Keeping up with versions and patches is becoming more important than ever - ignoring these fixes can be serious!

THE UP FRONT LINKS

A collection of time sensitive links covering current IT issues.

As a follow-up, here is another great story which describes Apple's current comeback:

http://www.cmpnet.com/special/0798spotlight.html?ls=twb_text

If you are not following Electronic Commerce developments and implications, you may be doing your company or clients a great disservice. The integration of this technology into the fabric of business is accelerating. This latest news from EDS illustrates this point. The company will offer Web-based billing services very soon. This will have a huge impact on the way we perform EDI in the future. It will also impact your relationship with your customers and suppliers.

http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/CWFlash/98081762F6

Recently, I wrote a column which described my programming staff's fascination with the abundance of free software products now available for enterprise level application:

Open Source Software Gets Hip

Forget the DOJ, Microsoft should worry more about the increasing acceptance of "open source" software:

http://mis.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa082798.htm

Now the news has broken that both Oracle and Informix will support the Linux operating system by the end of the year. This development represents a very serious paradigm shift in the software industry. Watch for more press and analysis of this:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980722S0001?ls=twb_text

Following the trend described above, Sun has announced a freeware approach for its Solaris operating environment. The company has now made it free for non-commercial use:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980810S0019?ls=twb_text

This trend has got to be very disturbing to the software giant Microsoft. Obviously the pricing model for software is breaking apart when key enterprise products can be produced by virtual teams of worldwide programmers who then license the software for free. The whole thing is now called the "open source movement". Believe me - you will hear much more about it in the months ahead. Too bad this is not happening yet for ERP software.

Speaking of Microsoft and ERP software, Microsoft is establishing a base of operations in the middle of "enemy" territory. The company is establishing a new 32-acre campus in the middle of Silicon Valley:

http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2555430713-ce2

ERP software leader Baan has announced a shake-up in its executive ranks. Founder Jan Baan will turn over his chairmanship to Tom Tinsley (who just became the worldwide CEO a month ago):

http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/CWFlash/9807282baan

As an IT Director, this is the kind of news I like to hear (especially since Uunet Technologies provides our T1 internet connections). Uunet has announced service-level agreements for its frame relay, dedicated 56k, T1, T3, and OC-3 Internet access services. Hopefully, this idea will spread to other providers:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980805S0002?ls=twb_text

The company I work for, Tokyo Electron (one of the world's largest semiconductor equipment makers) recently made this news with this announcement:

Wafer-Level Burn-In Will Cut Motorola Costs
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980804S0014

CIO Magazine posted a trio of excellent features for technology executives.

CIO reporting relationships, job title, and job accountability:
http://www.cio.com/archive/071598_rprt.html

The five most important questions to ask the CIO: http://www.cio.com/archive/enterprise/071598_value.html

Why IT and business managers should educate each other during the IT budgeting process:
http://www.cio.com/archive/enterprise/071598_budget.html

To wrap-up this section, last month, I complained about Microsoft's new satellite image database. Now IBM has made similar negative statements:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980710S0001?ls=twb_text

I can't resist reporting this bit of news from my hometown of Austin, Texas. Austin based Dell Computer Corporation has now pulled dead even with Houston, Texas based Compaq for the top PC vendor spot. I can tell you that a lot of folks in the city's IT community here are estatic - have you seen the latest U.S. stock price?

http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/CWFlash/9807271pcmkt

More news from Microsoft. The second beta of Windows NT 5.0 is due to ship, but customers have stopped waiting and are adopting NT 4.0 Workstation instead:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980817S0010?ls=twb_text

OK, so now that we are all using NT 4.0 - what about the long awaited release of Service Pack 4? Good news - it's on the way:

http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/CWFlash/98081762EA

Another important Service Pack release is Version 1 for Exchange Server 5.5. The Pack includes X509.v3 support, an anti-spam user interface, an organizational merge utility, a web forms creation/migration wizard, and Routing Object Libraries:

http://www.infoworld.com/scoop/sc?980811nw4

Oracle is now shipping updated versions of their Financial Analyzer and Sales Analyzer decision-support tools:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980813S0005?ls=twb_text

If you are a 3Com PalmPilot user (like me), you might find some interesting applications in ZDNet's new PalmPilot Software Library:

http://www.palmpilotsoftware.com

Ah, Sweet Innocence!

By Jeff Gainer

If anything good ever comes of the Year-2000 boondoggle, it will likely be a greater degree of attention and respect for software testing. A number of years ago, after writing my first software application, I expressed concern to the government agency whose databases my system accessed that their data tables had only two-digit year fields. I had managed to work around the problem for the time being, I noted, but innocently asked, "What are we supposed to do in sixteen years?" The reply was considerable amusement that I would worry about something so far in the future. After all, I was told, the whole software application would be replaced long before 2000 A.D.

And at last report, the software system has been replaced, indeed, even updated several times for new platforms, but alas, the two-digit years remain in the database.

The rise of rapid application development (RAD) and its love child, Frantic Application Development (FAD) spawned the trend toward no requirements, at least no written requirements. In many RAD development shops, testing is viewed as the final step in the software development life cycle. After a peculiar fashion, the software is developed, thrown over the wall to an ad hoc test team consisting of junior developers, clerical workers and a few business domain experts who happen to have a little free time.

In this environment, everyone plays around with the product, tries a few actual user scenarios, and otherwise "tests" by generally poking around for the few weeks allotted to "testing." The results are predictable: a few enhancements are suggested, a few glaring bugs are identified, and the product is somberly deemed "tested" and thus released to the hapless beta testers.

Today however, there is finally a serious trend toward treat software testing as the legitimate sub-discipline of software engineering that it rightly is. The industry (and our customers) have now become acutely aware that the Year-2000 problem is not confined to aging mainframe "legacy" systems, or buried in arcane or lost source code and yellowing project documents. Our legacy systems are aging, undocumented database tables lurking deep within webs of interdependent systems. Moreover, these noncompliant data definitions have spawned their own problems, encouraging time-pressured RAD developers to code around their non-Year-2000 compliant formats, exacerbating the problem.

If we had only tested these "non-critical" systems for Year-2000 compliance sixteen years ago--but then, such a jejune notion was considered amusing.

Copyright 1998, Jeff Gainer, All Rights Reserved

Known in some circles as "Jeff the Evangelist," Jeff Gainer teaches software testing and test project management for Intersolv. He is a contributing author to Developing Web Applications with Visual Basic 5 and Platinum Edition Using Visual Basic 5, both from Que. An occasional contributor to industry publications, Jeff's road-warrior lifestyle has been profiled in Computerworld and Infoworld. In addition to his technical writings, Jeff sometimes writes mystery fiction; his work has been published by The Case. On quiet summer evenings, he dons a patriotic costume, flies through the air, and fights crime.

You can visit Jeff's Web site and read some of his writings at <http://www.jeffgainer.com/>, or contact him by email at:
gainerj@jeffgainer.com.

Some more good stuff from CIO. First an excellent article regarding vendor relationships:

http://www.cio.com/archive/080198_select.html

The second CIO feature I loved! However, the subject makes me a little sad. Tom Davenport has left the University of Texas here in Austin to take a new position at Boston University. In this feature Tom covers every major IT issue in a one sentence spurt:

I Was Just Thinking... Tom Davenport's move to Boston
http://www.cio.com/archive/080198_think.html

Some more management food for thought...

IT departmental image and communication:
http://www.infoworld.com/scoop/sc?980818ft2

Global IT Issues:
http://www.informationweek.com/695/95iuwrd.htm?ls=twb_text

Managing inbound mass-emails:
http://www.infoworld.com/scoop/sc?980805ft2

Preventing IT employee turnover:
http://www.infoworld.com/scoop/sc?980708ft3

OK, here are the last two month's alerts. While building this collection I was quite surprised at the number of bugs and security risks which have surfaced at once. If this trend continues, our network administrators will be very busy. This is the most serious collection of problems I have ever seen.

Alert 1: A security hole in Windows NT that gives a hacker
the ability to change or add passwords, change access levels, and perform other admin tasks:

http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/CWFlash/9807282nthole

http://www.infoworld.com/scoop/sc?980728nw1

Alert 2: Microsoft Confirms a Windows 98 Date Bug

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_150000/150947.stm

Alert 3: Microsoft has posted updated security patches for
Outlook 98 and Outlook Express 4 that prevent the file attachment bugs recently reported:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980813S0003?ls=twb_text

Three other email companies also announced solutions and updates to their products to avoid the email attachment security threat:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980730S0010?ls=twb_text

This was the Eudora e-mail software security announcement:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980807S0007?ls=twb_text

Alert 4: A hacker group has posted a utility that can give
anyone on a TCP/IP network complete access to another person's Windows 95 PC:

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980807S0012?ls=twb_text

Alert 5: New CIH virus makes PCs unusable on a hardware level
(our company has found this virus on PCs all over the world):

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980728S0020?ls=twb_text

Worried about security? CIO magazine recently published this informative feature regarding hacker detection approaches:

http://www.cio.com/archive/080198_et.html

If you have read this far you are probably due for another cup of coffee! I would like to take a minute to tell you about the new itmWEB site launch. Last month I released the URL for the beta version of the itmWEB site. The site is now fully converted and upgraded. My favorite new feature is the search bar on the homepage. The itmWEB site has about 400 pages of resources, and this new search function will help you to pinpoint resources quickly. Many other new capabilities have been added as well. To visit the site, follow this link:

http://www.itmweb.com

Want to comment about anything you have read? Please post your thoughts in the Mining Company MIS forum:

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THIS MONTH'S FREE PLUG:

Personal Eiffel for Windows ($69.95). This is an offer to good to ignore. Eiffel is poised to become a serious alternative to Java based object oriented development. The package includes EiffelBench, an Editor's Choice selection in Object Magazine:

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