Welcome to the Online IT Week Insider.

This week has been eerily quiet. We think the monkeys have all gone to the 3GSM show, where they can hurl handsets at each other instead of half-eaten bananas while terrorising a much wider array of personnel.

We rushed out this edition of the Insider with one hand. The other was hammering nails into the planks we’re holding over the windows and doors with our feet. Maybe we’ve been spending too much time with the opposable-toed.

News:
NetSuite adds e-commerce tools to back office apps
NetSuite, the eCRM provider, has launched a new e-commerce module to go along with its back-office applications. The tools will make it easy to understand traffic on your site, provision customer self-service, and enable payment facilities. Will it also ensure that what you order is sent to you in a brown paper bag? We hope so.

More news:

New vendor group OSA backs open-source integration
New initiatives this week could make it easier for firms to integrate multiple open-source software elements. Whatever that means. Oh, we know what it means. It means that interoperability group the OSA (Open Solutions Alliance) launched, and SpikeSource said it will add the Ubuntu Linux distribution to the roster of open-source software it certifies to run together in pre-tested stacks.

This is also news:

Vista Defender flaw creates security risk
According to PatchLink, failure to patch a Microsoft patch... oh, hang on. Let’s start that again. This week PatchLink warned that Microsoft Vista is vulnerable to being taken over by hackers if its users do not patch the flawed Windows Defender Malware Protection Engine (MPE). If this sort of thing did not happen every week this would be our cover lead.

Comment:

Far-sighted software enables business to soar
Phil Muncaster has been hanging out and talking about travel, back offices, and being customer-centric. Yep. We think he wants to go to Thailand as well.

IT is our best bet for urban renewal
James ‘ Woody Woodpecker’ Woudhuysen had a row on Radio 4 last week. We told him to stop calling them, but he won’t listen. Anyway, after that he wrote this, in which he continues to vent, and suggests that a new wafer fabrication plant and a more enlightened national policy for science and technology would do Manchester more good than a supercasino. We are just lucky it wasn’t Radio 2. Then he would probably have requested some Kiki Dee.

IT Week Podcast
Audio analysis of the week’s events. This week Madeline Bennett discusses all the news from the 3GSM show in Barcelona, as well as mobile-phone roaming charges, which are set to go from “HOW MUCH?!?!” to “how much!?”

Lem Bingley blog
This week Lem is discussing the sort of letters that get sent to IT Week. A mixed bag, but one thing is for sure - within it lies a heart of darkness.

IT Week Labs blog
All the new business phones from this week’s hellish 3GSM show, including one with a full qwerty keyboard from Toshiba that hopefully is not quite as big as a laptop.

Green Business News
Businesses that fail to develop strategies to limit their greenhouse gas emissions could find it harder to attract investment capital, now that the FTSE Group has launched new criteria for its touchy-feely CSR index that will exclude firms ignoring climate change. Then again, it may be that capital decisions are taken by cigar-burning, gas-guzzler-driving, methane-spewing merchant bankers.

IT Sneak blog
No friends? Need a machine to send you a text message to get you out of the only social contact you have had for a while? Then Sneak knows just the site for you.

Phil Muncaster blog
This week Phil has been hanging out with Brian Eno and computer software that can “produce combinations of shapes and colours with a near endless number of permutations”, yeah right Phil. We believe you.

David Neal blog
Ray Mears, pugs, Valentines, and Vanilla Ice? No more coffee for that man.