Last week Cisco confirmed that a flaw in its VOIP system could potentially allow attackers to remotely activate a desktop telephone microphone, allowing an attacker to listen in to conversations in the area of the location of the phone.

Alfresco previewed its upcoming version 2.9 of its open-source content management platform. Alfresco continues to build out third party integration capabilities, including the ability to integrate with Adobe's "Flex-2-Web" framework, as well as iGoogle.

Microsoft recently unveiled a developer portal focused on building support for its unified communications platforms including "Office Communications Server 2007". A common theme among vendors in the UC space is developing horizontal and vertical applications that can leverage UC capabilities such as integrated communications, presence, and role-based routing.

Verizon's recent announcement of an expansion of its carrier Ethernet service offerings into Canada and Latin America, coupled with expanded service offerings in Europe demonstrates the growing importance of Ethernet as a WAN service. Forty-five percent of IT executives interviewed for the Nemertes benchmark Building The Successful Virtual Workplace said that their organization was using Ethernet (mostly in the metro area), with another 5 percent either evaluating or planning to deploy in the next two years, with many expressing a desire to deploy more aggressively as service coverage improve.

Microsoft recently released its long awaited Office Communications Server 2007 unified communications platform to manufacturing. With this move Microsoft stays on-target for a fall release after completing an extensive beta testing period.

Microsoft continues to position OCS as a tool that will enable enterprises to shift their telephony applications away from costly hardware toward application-based services while improving the ability of individuals and groups to communicate and collaborate.

Meanwhile Microsoft's competitors tout richer feature sets and proven enterprise-class reliability and scalability, a message that so far continues to resonate with enterprises as noted in the Nemertes benchmark , "Building the Successful Virtual Workplace." ITEs interviewed for the benchmark were by and large adopting a "wait-and-see" approach, planning to integrate their Microsoft presence apps with their telephony systems, but not yet ready to commit to replacing IP-PBXs with OCS servers.

There's no doubt many enterprise IT managers will spend next week fielding requests from employees who want to know how to sync their brand-new Apple iPhone with enterprise messaging and calendaring applications. But at this point in time the iPhone is a consumer device. Even with rumors of an impending announcement from Apple regarding support for Exchange ActiveSync, the iPhone lacks enterprise controls for security and management of mobile devices. However, the introduction of the iPhone should serve as a drive for enterprises to develop a mobility strategy that enables proactive, rather than reactive approaches as new devices hit the market.

Enterprise 2.0: Organizational Challenges Remain

Attendees at this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference saw numerous products demonstrating how social computing and unified communications can solve business challenges and improve the ability of virtual companies to collaborate. Still, organizational challenges remain a hindrance.

In Nemertes "Building a Successful Virtual Workplace" benchmark, only 8% of enterprises had created a company-wide collaboration and communications planning function. Most organizations still plan for adoption of tools and services within silos, meaning they are