Links that I have found interesting for January 7th:

• Network Frontiers, LLC – The focus of this site is to fully support the Unified Compliance Framework in every form and fashion. Together with our legal partners and Latham & Watkins LLP, the Network Frontiers team originated, designed, and built the Unified Compliance Framework (UCF). This site is dedicated to education and support of the framework.

  The UCF has a somewhat complex lifecycle that follows eight stages of development as shown in the diagram that follows. These stages of development are documented on this site, as well as the schema for the UCF and other pertinent documentation.

• Orb Data – How do I set the default TBSM View Definition? – Setting the Default TBSM View Definition

  To set the default view definition for the a service complete the following steps:

  1. Open the Edit Templates tab for template that the service belongs to
  2. Click the Additional tab.
  3. Click the New Parameter button.
  4. In the Parameter field type ViewDefName
  5. In the Default Value field type the View name you want (e.g. Concentric).
  6. Save the template
  7. Now edit the specific service and click on the Additional Tab again.
  8. This should now have the parameter ViewDefName created.
  9. If the default value is incorrect change it and press save.

  Now whenever you click on the service it will use the view definition defined.

• Cliff Meltzer Joins CA to Lead New Service Assurance Business Unit – Cliff Meltzer joined the company as corporate senior vice president and general manager of the Service Assurance business unit, which includes the company's application performance, infrastructure fault and performance, and database performance management product lines
• Study of Netuitive Customers Yields Startling Results – Netuitive, Inc. announced today the results of a third-party study by Enterprise Management Associates, which researched Netuitive's operational impact on a series of large corporations. Based on in-depth customer interviews, EMA concluded that Netuitive software:

  — Delivers up to a 700% return on investment over 3-years
  — Automates up to 70% of IT monitoring administration tasks
  — Increases alarm accuracy 5 to 10 times, which reduces Mean Time To
  Resolution (MTTR)
  — Conclusively was able to forecast service degradations

  The study included interviews with managers from one of the largest telecoms in the United States, a Fortune 500 insurance company and one of the world's largest banks.

• Connecting the computer dots – Connecting the dots is lots of fun. But what if someone brought you a picture that was already "dotted" and asked you to "disconnect" them – to figure out what dot got connected to which other dot in what order?

  Huh? Why in the world would anyone want to do that?

  Disconnecting dots in a picture surely is not something we'd bother wasting time on (unless a reward was being offered). But being able to successfully disconnect computer "transactions" – actions that takes place in on a hard drive, over a network, or across the Internet – is sometimes an activity upon which thousands of people depend for the resolution of a thorny computer problem, or on which the fate of millions of dollars sometimes rests. And that process, as it happens, has a lot in common with dot-disconnecting!

These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

• Phurnace Acquired by BMC – Great News – I am pleased to inform our customers, partners and suppliers that Phurnace Software has been acquired by BMC Software. This is great news for everyone: Especially our customers. We will accelerate our innovation and product expansion and we now have the global reach through BMC for sales, support and services. All of the things that you liked about Phurnace, you will love about BMC. The product will continue to be offered as a standalone solution, as well as part of a larger more robust enterprise suite, as part of the BMC BladeLogic family. The product will continue to integrate into a wide range of third party systems; and that capability will not be lost – it will be enhanced. The pace of new feature additions and new platforms supported will also accelerate. BMC shares the vision that Phurnace was formed on – automation of application deployments and configurations that save time, money and eliminate costly errors.
• HP BSM Briefing Center – IT organizations committed to more closely managing and optimizing their technology resources now have better tools than ever, thanks to the growing discipline of business service management (BSM). HP's Business Service Management Briefing Center offers regularly updated news, technology briefings, and Webinars to show enterprises how to successfully adopt BSM and bring greater efficiencies to their IT and business operations.
• Understanding Internet Explorer Rendering Behaviour Performance, Scalability and Architecture – Rendering is one of the key influencers of the perceived performance in web applications. In order to optimize the rendering behaviour of a web application you have to first understand how rendering works in the browser. Mozilla provides a very good documentation on how rendering works in Firefox. Although we are talking here about Internet Explorer, the basiscs are the same. The rendering task is responsible for transforming the logical representation of a document – the DOM – into a graphical representation. This process consists of two steps:

  * Calculating the layout based on DOM elements. This step is referred to as Calculating Layout in dynaTrace AJAX Edition. Mozilla refers to it as Reflow. However they admit that ”…perhaps should have been called layout”.
  * Drawing or painting of the HTML page

• Compuware offers churn adVantage – Compuware says that the tool, which combines DPI passive probes with the ability to view reports of application performance at the subscriber level, will help operators solve the issue of managing and reacting to problems users may be having with data services and applications.