Generally, Ferris Research reports and webinars are only availabile for a fee: either to subscribers or for a one-off payment. Occasionally, we run free webinars.

Wednesday March 2 is the date for the next free webinar. David Ferris and Richi Jennings will be discussing the cost of spam, covering the global costs and helping you understand how to calculate your organization’s costs.

Mark your calendar for 8:30am Pacific, 11:30am Eastern, 4:30pm UK, 5:30pm Central European.

More details below; you can sign up to attend here.

Continue reading ‘Free webinar: The Cost Of Spam’

Yesterday, we talked about the UK Government’s ITsafe security alerts system, and how it uses a "safeword" in an attempt to reduce spoofing attacks. We have some concerns:

Continue reading ‘ITsafe safeword concerns’

As reported elsewhere, The UK government today launched a service, ITsafe, for advising citizens about viruses and other threats. It comes from the NISCC (National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre).

To quote the website:

ITsafe is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack. It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.

While this is potentially good news, that’s not directly the point of this blog entry. However, one tiny aspect of the alerting service shows an interesting idea.

Continue reading ‘UK Government has an idea’

There’s already been a lot of interest in our two spam cost reports (here and here), released yesterday. One of the questions that’s coming up is about how the costs will likely change in the future. Will they go up, down, or stay the same?

In the future, the cost of spam should reduce, because the spam volume will substantially reduce. This seems like a bold claim, we know, but hear us out; here’s the logic:

Continue reading ‘The future cost of spam: an FAQ’

As regular blog readers know, we went to LinuxWorld last week. It was held in Boston, as opposed to the previous Winter LinuxWorlds, which were in New York. An interesting and busy event.

Continue reading ‘LinuxWorld: A Messaging Perspective’

IBM continued to extend their Workplace vision with the recent release of Workplace Collaboration Services (WCS for short).  This product integrates email, document management, instant messaging and web conferencing into a single platform that can really be seen as a collaboration portal. Read more about it here.

One of the most interesting aspects of Workplace, is that it comes from a very different perspective than traditional messaging and collaboration tools.  It is  process-centric, in that it attempts to de-emphasize individual software tools or functions and focus rather on addressing tasks with an integrated set of capabilities.  Most PC users experience messaging and collaboration in a tool-centric model today - switching (for example) between Outlook for email, AIM for IM, WebEx for web conferencing and Documentum for document management and so forth.

The process-centric approach is at the heart of what has been referred to as "contextual collaboration" for some time now.  I believe it is best embodied in the Activity Explorer feature of Workplace Collaboration Services.

Continue reading ‘Will process-centric collaboration take hold?’

Military forces throughout the world send email. They have a number of special requirements, focussed around reliability, accountability, delivery guarantees, and message integrity. Surprisingly, encryption is fairly low on the list. The main requirements are:

• Digital signatures, to identify senders, and ensure the message hasn’t changed