IT managers are looking for some specific business and technical skills. Here are the six key skills they wish their newest hires had picked up in college.

Microsoft has always been accused of stealing left and right from the open source community. Is this holding true today?

IT professionals know that handing data over to a third-party is always risky, but cloud computing creates unique concerns for IP. Here are nine tips to protect critical corporate data wherever it goes

To the world at large, computers are scary machines that are impossible to understand, and programmers are the mysterious geniuses who know how to manipulate them even if they are never able to fix yours for whatever reason.

Customer relationship management vendors and industry analysts discuss which CRM trends will continue to gain strength and what new trends IT professionals need to watch.

Organizations are using support calls to teach users about resolving their own problems, to generate detailed reports to find root causes, and to help adhere to complex auditing requirements by making sure all calls are tracked and monitored. Now that's my idea of a help desk!

Integrating your website with social media sites is typically the best approach to online marketing and ecommerce, but are there times when it makes sense to use Facebook instead of a traditional business website?

It's easy to turn a deaf ear to the controversy surrounding recent copyright protection bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the PROTECT IP Act, which threatened to curtail free speech on the Internet by allowing the U.S. Department of Justice to blacklist and block access to websites suspected of copyright infringement. Most of us don't visit websites suspected of illegally distributing copyrighted material, so blocking us from accessing them seems harmless. But should your ISP ever be legally obligated to prevent you from accessing restricted websites, it will have to find a way to monitor your online activity, and that could cause your

Companies long have grappled with glitches in their ERP (enterprise resource planning) system implementations -- a situation that the recent botched-rollout record suggests won't get better any time soon. While ERP projects go awry for many reasons, each incident reveals its own set of troublesome repercussions, financial and otherwise.

With commodity prices on a roller-coaster ride, and the world's currencies in a state of frightening flux, companies large and small have become mindful of the need to keep up with ever-more-complex derivatives and other hedging strategies. And the actions of standards-setters only add to the challenge.

We take a comprehensive look at the new green-IT metrics for measuring data center efficiency and productivity from The Green Grid and other industry groups. Insider, registration required.

This group of security companies includes several that want to capitalize on technology ideas that were originally devised to serve communities of special interest but could now take on a wider cybersecurity role. Fixmo, for example, has its roots in the National Security Agency where its mobile security makes it possible to run critical applications in sandboxes that are insulated from the rest of the machine, making them less likely to fall victim to malware that might have infected the device.