Microsoft and SAP to link Office with ERP By Joris Evers and John Blau
First joint product is due out later this year - SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. plan to deliver a jointly developed product later this year that links SAP's enterprise resource planning software and Microsoft's Office products, the companies announced recently.

Introduction to Disaster Recovery Planning By Paul Chin
Events over the last several years — Sept. 11; bush fires, earthquakes, and mudslides in the West coast of North America; massive floods in China; and the Boxing Day tsunami in Southeast Asia — have forced us to rethink what we consider critical infrastructure. These events brought about the loss of essential services, causing widespread panic and confusion amongst a population unable to handle the emotional and physical stress of what was unfolding before them.

Sarbanes-Oxley: Driving the Storage Compliance Boom By Steve Apiki
No government or agency regulation has refocused the energies of IT administrators and storage professionals like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Broad in its reach, short on implementation specifics, and bristling with teeth, the act has sent IT departments scrambling to get a handle on the compliant storage of business data almost from its enactment in 2002.

Tutorials: Discover UML By Mandar Chitnis, Pravin Tiwari, & Lakshmi Ananthamurthy
Introduction Modeling is an activity that has been carried out over the years in software development. When writing applications by using the simplest languages to the most powerful and complex languages, you still need to model.

Mobile Development: Why Should I Care? A Q&A with Nokia By Bradley L. Jones
If you've followed some of my writings, you will know that I evangelize that developers should be helping to move business logic away from an application's interface. This becomes even more important as the number of platforms continues to grow, and as the effort to tap into these platforms continues to ease.

Better Metrics For Application Development A Q&A with Forrester Research analyst Liz Barnett
Application development has been part of IT since before it was IT. In the days of MIS and the glass house, there was custom coding. But sadly, we're still wrestling with how to get the most out of it. "Traditional application-development projects estimate the cost and duration of a project and then report on progress relative to the plan. This approach communicates how much work has been completed, but doesn't address the value of the work," says Forrester Research analyst Liz Barnett. Contributing Web editor Howard Baldwin spoke with Barnett about the new metrics necessary to calculate value.

IBM's DB2 Strategy By Demir Barlas
Going after SAP users on Oracle databases; DB2 fits alongside IBM content management and integration offerings