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Cloud Connect
Santa Clara
Feb 13-16, 2012

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News, trends and analysis

Quick Bits

Intranet Lovefest
Execs from rival intranet vendors will gather in San Francisco for the Burton Group Catalyst Conference, July 15 to 18. Netscape's Marc Andreesen, Microsoft's Jim Allchin and Novell's Drew Major will field questions from show-goers about moving from NOSes to the intranet paradigm.

Frequent Surfer Miles
So your airline frequent-flyer miles aren't as lucrative as they used to be? Click*Me, a software package from Yoyodyne, awards frequent-fl yer points for visiting certain Web sites. Yoyodyne hopes to sell its software to big Web sites that will use the points for promotional purposes.

Start The Timer
Microsoft's new free 60-Minute Intranet Kit (www.microsoft. com/office/intranet) helps users build a ready-made intranet config uration based on Office97. Kits cover sales and marketing, human resources, finance and product development.

If there is something we ought to know, we welcome proposals for articles. Please e-mail us at H-REPORT@nwc.com.

Get The Message?
By Christy Hudgins-Bonafield and Kelly Jackson Higgins

Get ready for the e-mail firewall. That's what WorldTalk is calling its WorldSe cure server software, which acts like a firewall for e-mail by grabbing messages and making sure they are encrypted and digitally "signed," and then sends them on their way. WorldSecure uses the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Secure

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) technology, which performs the encryption and signs the messages. S/MIME has the backing of Microsoft Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp. The software is a result of WorldTalk's acquisition last year of Deming Software, which had the industry's first S/MIME implementation. WorldTalk rolled that technology into WorldSecure; the company ships the client piece under the name Secure Messenger.

When Push Comes To Shove
"Push" technology and news-filtering services that provide the news you want are among the features being added to plain-vanilla Internet access services. But behind the scenes, services like Individual Inc.'s NewsPage are playing another role --bringing true intelligent agent technology to the Internet, says Rich Vancil, vice president of marketing and business development at Individual. An intelligent agent is software that, in its most basic form, is part of a search engine--but in its most advanced form, it acts as a personal gofer. Purists say agents mimic your online behavior to lea rn and do things on your behalf, such as discovering that you surf the business page every morning and forwarding to you the news you would typically be interested in--all without your intervention. Geoffrey Bock, an analyst with the Seybold Group, says Individual's NewsPage and other early forms of agent technology, such as DowJones, have become mainstream. Having this level of information on the Internet sets the stage for a smarter agent to make the process more proactive and automated, he says.