Shared services ‘could save Scotland
£750m’
Scottish councils could save up to £750m by sharing back-office
functions, such as IT, payroll and human resources, according to
Scottish Executive finance minister Tom McCabe. He also said there
would be a presumption against compulsory redundancies when seeking
efficiency savings.
IBM offers access to SAP from Notes and
Workplace
IBM is giving its users access to data held in SAP ERP systems
through its Workplace and Notes applications. The integration
between SAP and IBM applications costs from £87 per user for
Workplace, but is free for Notes.
Morgan Stanley to pay £11.7m for US
lawsuit
Morgan Stanley is to pay £11.7m to settle a lawsuit brought by the
US Securities and Exchange Commission. It reached the deal after
failing to provide “tens of thousands of e-mails” relevant to an
investigation by the regulator.Morgan Stanley has also agreed to
adopt new procedures.
IP addresses to run out within seven
years
The world will run out of IP addresses in four to seven years,
analyst firm Frost & Sullivan has calculated. This is largely
due to the growing popularity of smartphones and other mobile
internet devices. The analyst firm highlighted anomalies – for
example, China has fewer IP addresses than Stanford University, and
the US Department of Defense has more than the whole of Asia.
BT prepares converged mobiles for
businesses
BT plans to launch mobile devices for business users that can take
calls over both Wi-Fi and GSM networks from early next year. The
corporate fixed-mobile devices follow the launch of similar
dual-purpose devices to consumers last year.
Icann drops proposals for xxx porn domain
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has dropped
proposals to create a .xxx domain. Proponents of the idea had
argued it would make it easier to identify and filter adult
websites.
Boots insources 100 IT employees from IBM
Boots the Chemist is insourcing 100 IT staff, as it scales back its
£710m outsourcing contract with IBM. The people being insourced
work on Boots’ central IT functions, including its helpdesk, Epos
development and support, batch scheduling and business analysis
systems.
Electronic road tax scheme falls behind
The House of Commons Transport Committee has said the government’s
electronic road tax scheme is facing significant delays, partly
because of problems with the MOT computerisation project. The
online scheme to tax vehicles was used by 200,000 drivers in 2005,
and is due to be extended to include older vehicles this year.
Spyware infections leap in first quarter of
2006
The number of computers infected by spyware rose dramatically
during the first quarter of 2006. Research by software firm Webroot
revealed a 15% jump in infected machines compared with the last
quarter of 2005. Trojan infections rose by 29%. The threats
uncovered included a Trojan capable of taking screen shots of
infected computers and e-mailing the contents to a remote
website.
UK ID cards will be read remotely, says
government
National identity cards will be fitted with a contactless chip that
will allow them to be read remotely, the Home Office has confirmed.
It said the chip was necessary to meet minimum international
standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. The
identity cards will be read by placing the chip on a reader after
being unlocked using special characters printed on the card.