John Fontana

Senior Editor, Infrastructure

 

jfontana@nww.com (303) 377-9057 Fax: (303) 377-9059

Network World 1200 Madison Street #676 Denver, CO 80206

Recent articles by Fontana

Microsoft Silverlight loses Major League Baseball to Adobe Flash
Nov. 19, 2008
Microsoft will no longer play under the bright lights of Major League Baseball, which has decided to throw out the vendor's Silverlight browser add-on in favor of Adobe's Flash.

Microsoft, Novell toast anniversary with tools, support coupons
Nov. 19, 2008
Marking the two-year anniversary of their partnership, Microsoft and Novell said Wednesday they were releasing tools to help users manage and support SUSE Linux.

Windows HPC hits top 10 among supercomputers
Nov. 18, 2008
Microsoft on Tuesday hit another high-performance computing milestone by placing its server for the first time in the top 10 on the list of the Top 500 super computers as judged by Top500.org.

Novell bolsters GroupWise 8
Nov. 17, 2008
Novell Monday shipped GroupWise 8, adding interface and administrative upgrades to its messaging and calendaring platform.

Lotus chief defines imminent battle plan
Nov. 17, 2008
Integration of traditional on-premises Notes-based collaboration, new unified communications tools, Symphony productivity applications, content management, Web-based services and the potential to mash it all together ...

Google, Microsoft take voice, social networking shots at one another
Nov. 14, 2008
Google and Microsoft this week traded counter-punches over voice and social networking tools as the two continue to battle each other over emerging technologies.

Microsoft/Nortel committed to marriage but future is cloudy
Nov. 13, 2008
Nortel's rocking financial situation and announced layoffs this week of 1,300 people likely won't have much short-term impact on the company's four-year unified communications alliance with Microsoft, including before ...

Microsoft kicks off next era of small business software
Nov. 12, 2008
Microsoft Wednesday released an updated bundle of infrastructure servers for small business and its first-ever offering tailored to midsized businesses, and said the two would evolve alongside the company's software- ...

Microsoft patch closes 7-year-old OS hole, expert says
Nov. 12, 2008
A former Microsoft employee who's now CTO for a patch management firm says an update issued by Microsoft on Tuesday closes a vulnerability that has been exploited for almost seven years and that he first identified ...

Novell lays out Red Hat attack plan
Nov. 11, 2008
Novell Tuesday took aim at rival and Linux market leader Red Hat with a migration service designed to help move Linux users onto Novell's Suse enterprise servers.

Microsoft touts virtualization, Windows 7 integration with Windows Server upgrade - Network ...
Nov. 07, 2008
Microsoft next week will distribute a pre-beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 to a select group of testers and highlighted the software's virtualization capabilities, integration with Windows 7 and other features.

Firefox plug-in takes address book up a notch
Nov. 05, 2008
Sxip, which develops the free single sign-on plug-in for Firefox called Sxipper, is working to revolutionize the use of address books by helping Web surfers link their contacts to information they are searching for on ...

Social networking changing face of collaboration
Nov. 03, 2008
An infusion of social software is helping fuel an evolution of enterprise collaboration that will eventually give users more flexible and distributed tools for finding, organizing and sharing data, according to a ...

Windows Azure FAQ: The future in a cloud
Oct. 30, 2008
This week, Microsoft finally took the wraps off the cloud operating system that CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at earlier this month and that has been under development for two years under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. ...

Microsoft reveals Windows Azure ship date, pricing metrics
Oct. 30, 2008
Microsoft's Windows Azure operating system and the online platform it anchors will ship in the second half of 2009, and its pricing will be based a set of usage metrics.

Microsoft steams into services era with Azure
Oct. 30, 2008
Claiming to set the stage for the next 50 years of computing, Microsoft this week unveiled a cloud operating system and a complementary slate of developer resources that will become the core of its services platform and ...

Microsoft extends Office apps to browser
Oct. 28, 2008
Microsoft Tuesday introduced Office Web applications, saying it would finally open its Office suite to access via a Web browser in the next release of the software.

The challenge of managing mixed virtualized Linux, Windows networks
Oct. 27, 2008
The growth of Linux, virtualization and services are fueling efforts by corporations to tune their management tools to accommodate mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments.

Microsoft to unveil tools to push identity platform into the cloud
Oct. 27, 2008
Microsoft Tuesday will unveil an open identity platform code-named Geneva that extends to the cloud and includes development tools, gateway technologies and provides long-awaited support for the SAML 2.0 protocol.

Microsoft earnings beat the Street
Oct. 23, 2008
Microsoft Thursday said the diversity of its software offerings helped it beat Wall Street estimates and post $15.06 billion in revenue during its fiscal first quarter of 2009.

Microsoft: VMM will ship Nov. 1
Oct. 22, 2008
Microsoft on Tuesday said development was complete on its Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and that the software, which is used to manage the company's new server-virtualization technology, would be generally available Nov. ...

Novell, Sun, Oracle crank out identity and access wares
Oct. 21, 2008
Novell, Sun and Oracle have announced updates to their identity-management platforms.

IBM launches Hosted Notes
Oct. 21, 2008
IBM Wednesday said its Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging service is now available and is targeting companies with 1,000 to 10,000 users.

Ballmer's tongue again causes trouble for Microsoft
Oct. 16, 2008
Microsoft Thursday issued a statement saying it still has no interest in Yahoo after CEO Steve Ballmer said that for shareholders a deal would make economic sense.

Quest's post-acquisition road map a killer for NetPro
Oct. 15, 2008
A month after buying NetPro, Quest Software Wednesday said it would discontinue nearly half of its former rival's products as part of its future management platform roadmap.