Best of ECT News

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

One of the long-feared results of Internet security problems -- its potential effect on consumer behavior and eventually, spending -- might be starting to materialize, according to a new report. The Pew Internet & American Life project says that a survey that it conducted found that 91 percent o...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall. The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Pau...

Not long ago, it sometimes took Web pages 30 seconds to load, thanks to slow, dial-up connections over-burdened servers and inexperienced Web design. Now, with high-speed connections and rapidly evolving technology, the days of slow-loading pages are gone. However, users might want to get used to wa...

Some 72 percent of the businesses evaluated by a Boston-based research firm scored poorly on their policies for re-using their customers' personal data for marketing purposes, but the researchers maintain that more companies are sensitive to privacy issues than ever before and are acting on that awa...

At one time, the gap between wireless and wired network capabilities was so vast that wireless networks were used only on rare occasions. That has been changing recently, according to industry watchers. "A growing number of enterprises are taking a look at whether a wired or a wireless network offer...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against spyware this week by asking a U.S. District Court Judge to halt an operation that allegedly plagued users who clicked for free file-sharing software with performance-slowing, private-information-gathering software that also altered search results...

I'm either fortunate or unfortunate enough to have gone through a couple of significant corporate cycles in the world of business in recent decades. In the 1980s IBM started as the most respected company in the industry and ended as that decade's "Evil Empire." In the '90s, and over what seemed to...

Long after they became fixtures in the hands of businesspeople and teenagers alike, mobile phones still hold a unique and unenviable position in the world of technology, a device that's loved and hated as intensely as any. Anyone who's ever been forced to listen to half a conversation held on a phon...

Y2K may be a distant memory, but there are plenty of other threats against corporate IT systems. In fact, today's list of disaster threats includes more than just hurricanes and blackouts -- chemical attacks and terrorist bombings have become a stark reality. Although fires, floods and earthquakes a...