Jason Brooks

Microsoft’s flagship desktop suite comes packed with modest, albeit worthwhile, enhancements to core Office capabilities, while breaking significant new ground by pushing Office apps beyond the bounds of the Windows desktop into rich, Web-based versions that perform as well on Firefox and Safari browsers as on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Read my full review at eweek.com.

Microsoft’s PowerPivot add-in for its forthcoming Excel 2010 spreadsheet enables users to work with much larger sets of data than is possible with Excel alone. Read my full review at eweek.com.

LABS GALLERY: Adobes LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 Takes to the Amazon Cloud by Jason Brooks Cloud Administration The LiveCycle Express edition I tested sports an easy-to-use Web console that interfaces with Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. Eclipse-Based The LiveCycle Workbench is based on the Eclipse IDE. Windows Required However, unlike other Eclipse-based development tools, a dependency on […]

Netezza’s Skimmer The latest addition to Netezzas family of open, blade-based analyticappliances, Skimmer, delivers faster performance at a fraction of the cost.Skimmer can power small to midsize data warehouses, and can serve as anedge appliance in larger hub-and-spoke deployments or as atest-and-development system in conjunction with Netezzas TwinFin. Skimmershares the same architecture as TwinFin and […]

Adobe’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite enables organizations to build applications through Adobe client technologies. Read my full review at eweek.com.

OpenOffice.org 3.2 Racks Up Spreadsheet Tweaks and File Format Fixes OpenOffice.org 3.2 Racks Up Spreadsheet Tweaks and File Format FixesBy Jason Brooks OLE Object Support, After OpenOffice.org 3.2 comes with better support for documents saved in Microsoft’s OOXML format, including support for Pivot Tables and OLE objects embedded in Excel spreadsheets. OLE Object Support, Before […]

Last month saw the latest release of OpenOffice.org 3.2, the first version of the open-source, cross-platform-friendly office suite to ship under the stewardship of Oracle. The new release is a modest update, marked primarily by improvements to the suite’s compatibility with Microsoft’s Office file formats, and by continued improvement in startup speeds and overall bug-squashing. […]

Not only does Diskeeper’s software attempt to prevent fragmentation from ever occurring, but it cuts power consumption and unnecessary I/O operations. Read my full review at eweek.com.

Version 3.2 of the open-source OpenOffice.org productivity suite delivers a handful of file format compatibility enhancements alongside feature tweaks for the suite’s Calc spreadsheet application and continued gains in startup speed for the suite as a whole. Read my full review at eweek.com.

LABS GALLERY: Jitterbit 3.0 Makes Quick Work of Integrating Disparate Apps, Data Sources LABS GALLERY: Jitterbit 3.0 Makes Quick Work of Integrating Disparate Apps, Data SourcesBy Jason Brooks Dependent Objects The Jitterbit client made it easy for me to track the dependencies between the elements of my integration project. E-Mail Alerts I could set up […]