Welcome to the IT Week Insider

This week we gave the IT Week monkeys a few days off, because of this the office was quite a sad and lonely place. Things got so bad that we were forced to go out speak to some people and actually do some work. Lordy, we know we normally do a lot of complaining about the simians, but boy, do they do the hard work so that we don’t have to.

Anyway, this is what the IT Week human element came up with, we would point you to the monkeys' holiday snaps on Flickr, but they didn’t bring us back any rock, so sod them… Hairy-faced monkey swine.

Editor's choice:
Pioneer unveils first 25GB Blu-ray drive
With high-density television and DVD bearing down on couch potatoes like a hyped-up Mr Motivator we expect to see many more releases of this kind over the next few months. Pioneer has got in first with its release of a Blu-ray-based DVD drive for PCs, which offers storage of up to 25GB on a single disk. The BDR-101A supports Blu-ray BD-R, BD-RE and BD-Rom specs, and by the sounds of it, is a Scrabble player's dream come true.

IT Week Podcast
Every week the team gets together and casts out some pods. Once we tire of this frankly pointless activity Madeline Bennett – News Editor, scrapes a few of the team together and picks over their brains like so much carrion. This week the team discusses a recent European ID cards event held in Brussels, and outlines the business features in the forthcoming Windows Vista releases. Importantly, at no stage does anyone play any James Blunt songs.

Comment:
How to pick a mobile email system
Pesky Bill Pechey doesn’t think that your choice of mobile email should automatically come down to whether the name, drloverman@ is still available. No, Bill reckons that firms should first focus on seeing how compatible the systems are, then consider what features they offer, and then start asking, “how much is this thing anyway?” Badboybill@mobilemail.com reckons that should you follow these golden rules you will find yourself richly rewarded.

News:
Business users must have role in BPM development
In preparation for the launch of its BizTalk 2006 integration and process management tools later this month Microsoft has been briefing customers about their benefits. According to Microsoft the suite will help firms to cut costs , create business opportunities and identify new revenue streams. It might also be a whizz in inter-departmental quiz nights – but as yet, that remains unproven.

New Barracuda kits secures IM
Network security vendor Barracuda has announced what it is calling the “first and only all-in-one instant messaging appliance”. The firm said that its IM gateway and server would help firms better manage instant messaging traffic, whilst also making the different IM clients interoperable. It had been a long day so we called it a thingy and gave it a little kick. It didn’t look that secure to us. 

Case Study:
Reed recruits virtual operator to cut costs
Reed managed services, which has put more students into office jobs than debt has, claims that its new telecoms contract will save it millions of pounds. The firm has not started barring calls to premium-rate telephone numbers - although that is a penny-saver - but has instead signed a contract with virtual network operator Sirocom. Under the deal Sirocom will supply converged voice and data services to the firm, across the country, and at a rather reasonable rate. Just shows what you can get when you ask. Can I have ten pounds?

Editor's blog
IT Week editor Lem Bingley gives an inside view on IT Week.

IT Sneak blog
Odds and ends from the weird world of IT.
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