15 real ways to secure teleworkers
Michael Cooney of NetworkWorld summarizes the NIST’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) recommendations for ensuring remote working security. “Cache cleaning: A computer that is temporarily used for remote access. Some remote access methods perform basic information cleanup, such as clearing Web browser caches that might inadvertently hold sensitive information, but more extensive cleanup typically requires using a special utility, such as a disk scrubbing program specifically designed to remove all traces of information from a device. Many organizations offer their teleworkers assistance in removing information from personally owned devices.”

How six high-flyers stay ahead of time
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Sarah Wilson talked to several highly successful individuals for tips on how they manage to tame their busy work days. “The facts are these: according to 2008 research, on average we turn to our in-boxes 42 times and receive 200 messages each day. A UK survey found the average employee spends four hours every workday on technological interruptions. Ironically, technology was meant to save us time. Now the majority of time management discourse centres on techniques for managing our phones, personal digital assistants and a stream of email.”

Is Sales 2.0 New? Improved? Social?
In CustomerThink, Bob Thompson presents an analysis of the term “Sales 2.0″ in an attempt to define it in the context of today’s increasingly connected world. “Tacking ‘2.0′ at the end of a term is shorthand for ‘new and improved,’ usually with a social media slant. However, after attending a recent Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco—an excellent and well-attended event hosted by Selling Power and Genius.com — I left with more questions than answers…”

The Next Trust Infrastructure: Securing Mashups

The VeriSign blog discusses mashup scaling security concerns and features a simple but smart solution. “For mashups to become ubiquitous, a trust infrastructure is needed. To establish trust between a widget aggregator (a consumer portal, the enterprise portal or your homepage or TV screen), and a widget provider, protocols like OAuth essentially rely on the exchange of shared secrets. This works well when there are only a few big portals serving as aggregators. However, because they require pair-wise trust relationships, the approach does not scale to a truly distributed environment. In particular, the model breaks very quickly in the enterprise as the number of network end-points (enterprise portals and SAAS) explodes.”

IBM ‘green’ survey: reducing electricity use biggest driver

Steve Wexler talks about the findings of an IBM study on global IT investments on eChannel Line. “Controlling cost is the strongest factor driving all 11 initiatives. The reasons most often cited for undertaking environmentally friendly IT projects is decreased electricity use, followed by decreased consumables use, increased features and functionality for the business, decreased future operational expenses or investments, meeting customers’ demands, and realizing credits or rebates from local utilities and governments.”

Go platform independent or go away!
Educator Jeff Tyson of Addietood explains the importance of platform-independence for the future of the learning industry. “Why should you care? If you’re an applications vendor and you don’t have a strategy for making your application platform-independent or at least creating an alternate platform-independent variant, then you will severely limit your growth potential as the rest of the world cares less and less about what OS runs the hardware. If you’re a training vendor, then you need to adapt to supporting clients with varying needs and not assume that Windows will always be the common denominator. And finally, if you’re a learning technologies consumer, you should have choice and freedom from being tied to a particular OS or hardware platform when you plan your training approach.”

Enterprise Search Booms on Compliance Needs
On InternetNews.com, Alex Goldman shines the spotlight on enterprise search as software companies ramp up to meet demands. “For those vendors touting compliance, the goal is to enable enterprises to clearly separate audit tasks from database administration. ‘Compliance is the magic word,’ said Mark Kraynak, vice president of marketing for Imperva. ‘Many of our customers have 50 or 100 or 200 databases. Our promise is that you can forward all the audit information to one place. Many companies have nothing in place today that can do that.]”

Telecommuting a definite trend

Grace Gagliano presents statistics and different real-world implementations of telecommuting, as well as cautions against a rising number of related scams. “A significant increase has already been seen in the telecommuting industry since 2006, according to a survey by WorldatWork. The global nonprofit human resources association reported the number of U.S. workers who telecommute at least once a month has grown from 28.7 million in 2006 to 33.7 million in 2008, a 17 percent increase. And, according to the study, the number of people who work remotely at least once a month has risen 43 percent from 2003.”