Historically, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has its roots in mechanical and electrical engineering, specifically the automotive industry. Its use was pioneered to manage a product (for instance, a car) from inception and on through computer-aided design (CAD),...
PDM/PLM-Product Data and Lifecycle Management
Dropbox: Do Everything!
I will assume that everyone reading this is familiar with Dropbox -- my favorite program ever -- but I would like to highlight some newer features and espouse the virtues of this program in case anyone is still living in 2007. Dropbox acts as a shared folder between...
Gain Greater Insight into Storage Device Operation with HD Tune
This week we have a look at HD Tune, which analyzes and benchmarks storage devices. HD Tune can be used on either hard disk drives (HDD) or solid state drives (SSD), which allows for comparisons between these different types of devices. Here are some useful features...
Understanding Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development methodology that uses small and frequent incremental changes to the code base, which are incorporated into a rapid build and test environment. Each change integrated into the source repository is verified by the...
How to Ramp Up Your New Product Development While Servicing Your Existing Customers
To succeed in any market, a company needs to innovate, pioneer and push out the borders. The recent one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs reminds of one of the tech industries greatest comeback stories. Apple's key to success, other than the charisma of Jobs...
Outsourcing of Vital IT Tasks to Grow in 2013
In 2013, roughly one third of businesses will increase their IT outsourcing budgets. Chief Information Officers and CEOs, from small businesses to large enterprises, are planning to up their spending on the outsourcing of web/e-commerce platforms, application...
5 Reasons You Want Windows 8 Now
Enjoying Windows 8, yet? I had been running Developer Builds and Consumer Previews for some time; I was super excited when I finally upgraded to the Windows 8 Pro Release build (for a promotional $15, I might add). Despite recently writing a guide on accessing...
Macs in a Corporate IT Environment
Macs running OS X have been around for quite some time, but only recently have they gained enough traction with our customers at SPK to be used as their day to day desktop environment. Historically, IT organizations have been reluctant to embrace this change. This...
LinkedIn Password Database Leaked!
LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, has reported that its user database has been hacked and the encrypted passwords of 6+ million users have been stolen. Even though the password database was encrypted, users with weak passwords could be exposed with...
Deploying IPv6 on a Cisco IOS router with a Tunnel Broker
The time has finally come! Just a few days ago, major internet companies participated in IPv6 Launch Day – meaning from this point forward, they will be running their production systems and making their services available to you via the IPv6 in addition to IPv4....
5 Tools You Can Use to Eliminate Malware From Your Machine
One of the more common requests I receive from users is that their computer is running slowly, or even worse, they're getting a popup saying that their machine is infected with a virus and Extreme AntiVirus 2013 can remove that virus for the low low cost of $39.95!...
Keep Your Developers Developing!
Software companies often choose to rollout new products by having their developers work directly with beta test customers. But is this really a good idea? Not really, but let's understand why not, and then consider a couple of best practices if you just have to do it...