You’ve got to get moving if you haven’t already filed your tax return because April 15 is nearly here. This year, it is important to file if you are eligible for an economic stimulus payment. If you don’t file then you don’t get paid. On March 29 the Internal Revenue Service teamed up with tax operations run by such organizations as AARP and the United Way to help the many folks who don’t typically file and held what the agency called “Super Saturday”, one way the IRS and its partners are working to ensure everyone eligible receives a stimulus payment. IRS spokesman Jim Dupree said “For millions of Americans, filing a tax return is not routine” he also said that “Their income is either too low or not taxable”.

Specifications, implementation, and maintenance problems can all cause disastrous problems when it comes to Web Application Security. Has your software evolved over years and years of development? You are not alone. Most software has features added with use and grows more complex as time goes on. In-house testers tend to gravitate toward their area of expertise and just like clusters of tests executed, bugs are found in a concentrated portion of your software.

With software security, especially of application exposed to a large audience via a Web browser, increased reliability comes from decreasing the correlations between tests. And not all bugs are born alike. Deque Web Application Security Reviews can help detect bugs that have the largest negative impact.

We can help you define your security objectives and standards, code reviews, security penetration testing, and a security deployment review. You may also want to explore how Deque Worldspace Security Practice can help identify code vulnerabilities for common attacks like cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection.

Source: deque.com

by Matt Hines

EC-Council University’s security science program aimed at helping qualified IT professionals advance their skills and take on high-level industry jobs.

EC-Council University, a New Mexico-based distance learning company, has launched the program to help qualified workers advance their training and move to the next level of the security profession.

Founded in 2006, the school is a spin-off of the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants, an online trainer that claims to have certified more than 40,000 IT professionals already, including 12,000-plus security specialists.

With the growing need for highly skilled security experts among businesses, EC-Council founders say there’s a scarcity of people who have all the know-how necessary to make the leap to CTO-level work.

“Traditionally, a lot of white hat hackers have been people with computer science backgrounds who taught themselves about hacking, but we’re trying to change the surface of the industry because we can’t leave this field of study up to chance,” said Jay Bavisi, president of EC-Council.

Continue reading from: infoworld.com

Using SharePoint server 2007, you can update, share, and discuss data such as customer communications; employee authored content, interactions with service providers and experts engaged on projects; and news related to the company, that too all under one roof. Taxing to and fro of emails can be dodged. In SharePoint Site, staff and management will be able to glance through or make changes in the company content right at one place. Less storage space is also required. News stories meant for the company’s intranet folio which essentially needs to be analyzed by the concerned superiors before getting posted can be done swiftly concurrently at the central space.

Using another such solution from Microsoft, i.e., Dedicated Exchange Server, employees and employers can enhance their email communication. The main advantage using Hosted Microsoft Exchange is that it can be integrated with SharePoint site. It also allows for wireless synchronization, archival of emails, download of heavy attachments even on the phone, access to contact list, so on and so forth. Cheap Exchange hosting services are available in the market. Also, application hosting and free hosting templates for project management, content management, document management, etc. are easily available these days.

Whilst you make a social network by means of SharePoint, users, private spaces, etc. are by default being developed for each user you adjoin. These individual spaces are known as My Sites, which operates similar to other existing social network sites, however with additional features and abilities. The My Site feature in SharePoint allows to see and administer data, links, calendar, associations, and other private data.

Originally speaking, in SharePoint Server 2010, each My Site has an integrated blog. Additionally, users can generate new SharePoint sites and fasten them to an on hand Team Site. This provides a blog to the team that adjoins additional content and value along with their document repositories, calendars and lists. SharePoint also allows for blog archiving which can also be indexed. Thus, it makes the blog a storehouse for combined facts and data.

People Search is an imperative SharePoint Server 2007 feature for big or emergent organizations. It helps search and find exact people much easier. Several kinds of search features are available to use, for instance the By Expertise search feature. Also, search results can be differentiated by tabs such as job title or by social distance.

Microsoft SharePoint Services also has integrated wikis for information sharing and information and group collaboration on content. SharePoint Wiki features include approval workflows and permissions, document check-in, and version history. There is also an option to use hyper-V hosting with a dedicated SharePoint server. SharePoint price is also not too expensive.

Free hosting templates, hosted blackberry, and Exchange host are also available through SharePoint hosting providers.

Exchange hosted email gives easy access to mails on your phone. But prior to setting up with shared Exchange hosting, check what kind of mobile phone you are carrying and whether it is compatible with the local wireless provider. Also, as you are a non-resident of Colombia, to buy Microsoft Exchange, first verify with your home country’s local mobile provider regarding their arrangements with the wireless providers in Colombia. Also, find out the schemes offered by the wireless providers in Colombia. Comcel is the biggest wireless provider in Colombia. What more, the Spanish speaking natives of Colombia can use the Exchange Email features in their own native lingo as Exchange 2010 hosting is available in an assortment of languages.

All in all, using Exchange Hosting on your phone is simple. It provides the opportunity to both equally.

Anyone should be aware of the frustrations associated with making it work properly and effectively if you have developed any kind of web system or a basic web site. A minor testament to the problems is the Compendium Developments, that plague even simple information sites like this one. Trying to help the readers, taking them through the many aspects of delivering a Quality Web System and using a single example case study, to help them meet a desired level of quality this is not aimed solely at testers but does illustrate how to go about testing web sites and systems.

Yet another interesting and glaring difference between SBS 2003 Microsoft Exchange and SBS 2008 Microsoft Exchange version is the anti-spam feature. The new version includes an anti-spam migration tool unlike the earlier version which reduce the amount of spam you get with support for content filtering and Internet IP block lists. Other improved features of Windows Small Business Server with Microsoft Exchange 2007 include improved calendaring, unified messaging, improved mobility, improved web access, 64-bit performance & scalability, command-line shell and simplified GUI, improved deployment, role separation, simplified routing, a new command-line shell and scripting language for system administration, unified messaging that lets users receive voice mail, e-mail, and faxes in their mailboxes, and lets them access their mailboxes from cell phones and other wireless devices, improved database size limit, and increase in the maximum number of storage groups and mail databases per server, to 5 each for Standard Edition (from 1 each in Exchange Server 2003 Standard), and to 50 each for Enterprise Edition (from 4 groups and 20 databases in Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise).

All in all, SBS 2008 with its renewed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 component is definitely worth grabbing, and it is more affordable as Small Business Server hosting from a service provider. So if you are still using the older version, don’t forget to switch over to the new version.

Most enterprise applications need some basic user security features. At a minimum, they need to authenticate their users, and many also need to authorize access to certain features so that only privileged users can get to them. Some apps must go further and audit what the user does. On Windows®, these features are built into the operating system and are usually quite easy to integrate into an application. By taking advantage of Windows integrated authentication, you don’t have to invent your own authentication protocol or manage a user database. By using access control lists (ACLs), impersonation, and features such as groups, you can implement authorization with very little code. Indeed, this advice applies no matter which OS you are using. It’s almost always a better idea to integrate closely with the security features in your OS rather than reinventing those features yourself.

In the real world, we face the following challenges:

* Privacy regulations and other pieces of legislation are impacting what kind of information we are allowed to capture and store about users, so in some cases we can’t just demand that people give us all of their personal details.
* Businesses want to inter-operate with other businesses, and government organizations want to provide more integrated services to citizens. However, different systems use different authentication systems and businesses want to integrate in a secure, legally compliant manner.

Consequently, claims based authentication in SharePoint Server is designed to address the two challenges mentioned above. Claims based authentication addresses privacy and other compliance concerns by requesting less specific, less personal information about people, and by trusting other parties or systems to do the “proof of identity” check. Claims based authentication addresses integration of different systems by allowing communications using open standards, and by providing a platform for developing more specialized ‘identity connectors’ between systems.

How to implement Claims based authentication?
The claims-based authentication is implemented in the following way:
* From a developer’s point of view, the platform that Microsoft is providing is called the Windows Identity Foundation. Earlier, it was called the Geneva framework. It provides a programming library suitable for building claims-aware applications. This library is also used by SharePoint 2010
* Active Directory Federation Services implement services to create, accept, and transform tokens that contain claims.
* Cardspace provides a user interface for users to select which “identity card” they wish to use for a particular system

Claims based authentication won’t address the lifecycle management of identity information.

Claims based authentication may let our system know that a user is a contractor from a partner company, but it alone won’t let us specify a rule that says “all of my company’s financial spreadsheets must not be seen by contractors”. Not only does claims based authentication not provide this capability, but neither do the role-based access controls provided by SharePoint. In fact SharePoint’s role-based access control model itself is too limited to address this. It still needs substantial improvements.
Claims based authentication feature was not available in MOSS 2007; SharePoint Server 2007 uses a native Active Directory-based authentication between machines and systems. In addition to claims based authentication, take advantage of other exclusive features in SharePoint Server 2010 and also enjoy some free SharePoint templates or web parts that come with SharePoint products.

A SharePoint Server library is a specialized form of SharePoint lists that are used to store document type data rather than metadata based items. The main difference is that in a normal list the metadata is what defines an item in the list while in a library the document is the main focus. However, libraries do support metadata. Libraries are created in much the same way as normal lists and support the same type of functionality such as workflows, event triggers or handlers, various display options, and custom forms for editing or entering data.

Document Library
A document library in SharePoint is where you upload your main or core documents. Document Library comprises a row and column view with links to the documents. Thus, whenever the document is updated, the link is created on your site. You can also track metadata of your documents. Meta data in SharePoint includes document properties. In the document library, you and your users can design dashboards, reports, charts, and models in Excel rather in hard to learn developer tools. You can easily deploy them with SpreadsheetGear for .NET.

Video Library
These days companies need to share more than just documents. From training materials to commercials, companies are accumulating rich media like videos quickly. While SharePoint is pretty good at storing a lot of things, video and audio files have their own needs. SharePoint Video Library helps you create a centralized location for not only storing videos, but for playing them back and sharing them as well. The SharePoint Video Library provides several advantages over a standard Document Library, such as:

o An embedded video/audio player that supports multiple file types
o The ability to capture and display media metadata (e.g. file type, duration, resolution etc.)
o Display of video thumbnails
o Storage of media within the library, or linked to using external sources
o Ability to share links to videos, or embed them into another page

The SharePoint Video Library provides users with a simple but powerful library that is custom made for storing media. Authorized users can upload or link to video and audio files in a variety of formats and locations, while other users can view details (like resolution and length), and playback the content from within the library using the embedded player.

So, hitherto if you were facing issues with document or content management at your workplace or anywhere then you know now what to look for. Take advantage of the advanced features included in the SharePoint family of products that include SharePoint Foundation 2010, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and numerous free SharePoint templates and web parts.