September 18, 2007

FEATURE EDITORIAL

Inaugural Application Continuity Conference

A two-day conference that focused exclusively on application and business continuity issues and solutions took place in San Jose, California last week. The conference, managed and presented by ApplicationContinuity.org, had an agenda mixing business, IT, analyst, and media speakers including case studies and presentations from companies like Microsoft, and HP, as well as From the Trenches case studies. I participated on a panel, surprising well attended for a Friday afternoon, debating the merits of on-premise vs. hosted solutions.

The event organizers assigned us one side to debate. My fellow panelists were Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of Teneja Group and Eric Knorr, executive editor for InfoWorld and we represented the on-premise team. The hosted team included Steve Norall, senior analyst of Teneja Group, Doug Dinely, executive editor for InfoWorld Test Center, and Gary Chen, senior analyst with Yankee Group. We had a lively discussion. In truth, all of us could have argued either choice, but it was fun to think up reasons to counterpoint anything the other team presented. We were fortunate to have a wonderful interactive audience too. In the end, it was apparent to me that with so many variables, including complexity, organization requirements, control needs, policies, cost considerations, etc, that no one side is always "right" or "wrong". ApplicationContinuity.org is interested in continuing the conversation with attendees, as well as those unable to make the conference, through its Website.

Email, Web, and Malware Trends for August

Last week, Secure Computing Research published a report providing a view of the Internet threat landscape and trends based on its TrustedSource and Secure Computing R&D work. The report highlighted activity in the two most popular parts of the Internet: Messaging and Web. The report summary included:

Mail/Spam Volume

Mail volumes increased dramatically during the month of August, eclipsing even the record highs established last December, with spam making up 89 percent of all email. The increase was largely caused by the huge number of fake greeting card and YouTube video emails with links to malicious Websites sent by the Storm worm, as well as large amounts of PDF spam also distributed by Storm. At the end of the month, Storm had ceased to distribute PDF spam, most likely due to a lower response rate from users for this type of spam.

Malware

Trojans accounted for over 78 percent of all newly discovered malware in August, followed by Adware and Spyware that made up almost 14 percent. 97 percent of all new malware came in the form of Windows Executable files

Zombies

An average of 264,133 new zombies were detected daily in August, many associated with the new infections caused by the Storm worm

Web Threats

An average of 11,906 total new malicious Websites were detected daily in August. Over 50,000 of them had been used by the Storm worm to host the Mpack exploit toolkit, which it uses to infect victim machines.

For real-time statistics and information from Secure Computing Research for email and Web-based threats, click here.

IN THE NEWS:

CommuniGate Systems Brings Enhanced Call Control and Calendar Features to Pronto!

Last week CommuniGate Systems, a provider of scalable carrier-class Rich Media Internet Communications solutions, announced a new version of Pronto! The company says Pronto! version 1.2 delivers key new call control and calendaring features, including "click to call" and shared calendar management. Pronto! integrates status, contact lists, and call management. Through their contact list, users can place a call to a colleague or friend who is online with a single click — without changing screens or looking up phone numbers. Pronto! initiates the call through an attached SIP phone or soft client. This latest version delivers additional call management enhancements, including the ability to access voicemail, call records, and call control configurations, such as call forwarding, all from the integrated Pronto! dashboard. Also included are improved calendaring features. With version 1.2, users can create and modify calendar events with drag-and-drop, utilize shared calendars, and merge multiple calendars into a single view.

Availability

The CommuniGate Pro Enterprise Suite, including Pronto!, is available now, starting at US$849 for 25 users. ISP and Carriers contact CommuniGate for pricing information.

EmailLabs Now Available On Salesforce.com's AppExchange

EmailLabs, an email marketing solution from J.L. Halsey Corporation, yesterday announced its availability on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The two-way integration between the EmailLabs and Salesforce applications enables users to create, send and manage email campaigns directly from Salesforce and automatically update lead status based on users' responses. The announcement was made this week at Dreamforce '07, Salesforce.com's user and developer conference. According to the companies, users can:

• Deploy email marketing campaigns and send personalized emails directly from Salesforce via the EmailLabs tab.
• Create and segment lists based on Salesforce-defined fields without the hassle of exporting contacts to a different application.
• Easily map Salesforce fields to EmailLabs data fields. For example, a user could create a new EmailLabs field called "Product of Interest" on the fly and tie it to an existing Salesforce field in just a few clicks.
• Automatically add responses, such as opens, clicks and bounces, to Salesforce contacts' activity details, after a marketing campaign launches.
• At the user's discretion, update lead status based on campaign responses. For example, a user can automatically set the lead status to "Working Contacted" for any contact that clicks a link.
• View reports on campaign effectiveness from either Salesforce or EmailLabs.

Availability:

Built on the Force.com platform, EmailLabs is now available for test drive and deployment.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Messaging Newswire’s News & Trends in Email Security. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Stephanie Jordan. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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