Some 250 senior operational and IT military leaders from across the world are due to gather in Lisbon, Portugal, today, to discuss how information technology can improve defense and security operations.

Tim Bloechl, managing director of worldwide public safety and national security at Microsoft, said: We’ve developed close strategic contacts with a number of national militaries, working in partnership with them to ensure they’re equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

He added that SharePoint is improving collaboration among militaries internationally.

The company went on to say that military IT and document management demands differ from those of civilian organizations, as technology must be highly reliable, stringently secure and scalable across thousands to millions of users, while being cost effective to deploy.

Added Joseph Bustos, a career US Army veteran and managing director at Tactical Systems, a Microsoft Gold Partner specializing in complex SharePoint and Information Worker technologies:  “Military commanders demand timely accurate information from thousands of sources at different echelon levels.  SharePoint collaboration, workflow and other features help streamline the flow of information while allowing multiple users immediate access to critical data and eliminating delay while reducing human error.  SharePoint allows military personnel to focus on accomplishing their missions more effectively and efficiently than previously possible”.

Microsoft delivers these demanding requirements through platform products such as SharePoint, Office 2007 and Windows Vista that today provide the IT infrastructure for military customers.  Many partner-developed, Microsoft-based solutions represent a lifeline to soldiers operating on the front lines in dynamic combat conditions, where access to accurate, timely information can make the difference between lives saved and lost.

Microsoft technologies are in the forefront of efforts to address the growing complexity of defense and security missions, particularly the need to coordinate operations across coalitions straddling disparate military and civilian agencies.

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Tactical Systems has developed a proactive information assurance and forensic solution for accountability and tracing of both authorized and unauthorized document dissemination by knowing who, when and where a user accessed a controlled document, the Secure Document Control System for SharePoint.

Joseph Bustos, managing director at Tactical Systems, a Microsoft Gold Partner specializing in complex SharePoint and Information Worker technologies said:  “Accountability and document control are paramount concerns for military and government agencies.  Many major document and content management solutions are inadequate for the storage of sensitive or classified documents because they lack the ability to track who, when and how a user accessed the controlled document.”

Whenever a user accesses a document within a SharePoint Document Library (for viewing, downloading, etc), the fully integrated SharePoint Document Control System for Sharepoint will first identify the user’s credentials, machine name, ip address, document identification, version, and the exact time and date when the document was accessed.  Next, the application software will determine the appropriate security policy based on the security clearance of the user and embed a watermark to the document both physically and digitally.  The document is then instantly made available to the user.  This safeguards against security breaches and inadvertent disclosures.

The tool allows users to designate a security classification for documents based on their organizations’ security policy, to determine the sensitivity of the material being stored and indexed within SharePoint. In the case of classified documents, it automatically applies encryption specific to the security classification.

Tactical Systems unique technology goes much further.  The source of information leaks can be traced by using its technology.  Whenever a user accesses the document within the Secure Document Control System for SharePoint, the technology will embed encrypted information on the document that indicates the source of the document and any copies made thereof.  Then, if an information leak occurs and a leaked document or one of its copies or even a small portion of the document is obtained as evidence, the source of the leak can be determined.

Joseph went on to add “Sensitive and classified document accountability problems are not unique to the military and government agencies.  Many organizations both public and private have a substantial number of sensitive business documents – this includes health records, financial records, business documents or even movie screenplays – that are compromised daily and the accountability controls over them do not ensure that sensitive information is being adequately controlled.  This applies to large enterprises, as well as small and medium-sized organizations that face the same data leak challenges and regulatory requirements, with fewer technology resources and budgets.”

More than 220 million private records have been breached in the last three years – a trend that continues to increase in Web 2.0 information sharing world. With the average cost of a data leak incident reaching $6.3 million in 2007 and increasing over 3%  to $6.5 million in 2008, organizations of all sizes must act to protect sensitive data.

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MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, AL - February 17, 2009 - (AFNS) – The Maxwell-Gunter Virtual Operations Center was named an Air Force Best Practice for 2009, and its creator was honored as a “Top 10 Performer” at the Air Education and Training Command Symposium in January here.

Using existing Sharepoint software, Maj. Scott Loller, 42nd Air Base Wing Plans and Programs Office deputy chief, developed a virtual method to manage information during emergency situations and base exercises.

“We’ve been using the VOC for about a year and were able to showcase it at the AETC Symposium,” he said. “Air Force Instruction 10-2501 requires every base to have a VOC, but it doesn’t provide the software for the center. So, I took Sharepoint and built a VOC that satisfied all the requirements.”

Rand Singleton, a command and control analyst and a common operational picture subject matter expert who is assisting with the VOC program, said the template Major Loller designed is being used by more than 40 Air Force bases worldwide. At present, Major Loller’s program is the interim standard for the Air Force.

“Everyone I’ve talked to likes the versatility of the VOC,” he said. “I have had a couple more bases say they are interested in developing a VOC.”

Major Loller said Sharepoint is a Microsoft application that all AETC bases already have, so there is nothing to buy and it’s no cost to the base. Sharepoint is a Web-based collaboration tool that can be accessed by users with varying levels of permissions.

Teri Baker, 42nd ABW Plans and Programs Office chief, said the VOC program has been useful for a number of projects, especially for the base’s Emergency Operations Center.

“Before the EOC had the VOC, we had to fax information to people and wait for replies,” she said. “Now, we can make real-time decisions based on real-time inputs with virtually no delay.”

Ms. Baker said the program proved valuable during one of the hurricanes this past fall that brought evacuees to Maxwell-Gunter.

“The VOC allowed people to think ahead and develop courses of action, and that got a lot of people quickly out of harm’s way,” she said. “We had a large influx of people coming to the base, a fact immediately obvious to those involved because of the VOC, and that allowed them to make decisions on how many shelters would be needed. The VOC really reduced the confusion a situation like that can cause.”

Another aspect of the program is the elimination of wasted time, effort and money that puts the program in line with Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century goals. Major Loller estimates that each base using his template is saving about $100,000 in software and development costs, and that amounts to a total savings of about $4 million for all 40 bases.

Dr. Phil Chansler, Air University’s Lean Business Office director, said the major is going through the AFSO21 certification process, and the VOC fits right into that process.

“He needed to be able to facilitate a group of people through a problem, and he was able to use his AFSO21 certification training to make the VOC a better product,” he said.

Dr. Chansler said the VOC removes waste from the energy management process and allows people to focus on adding value to the process by more efficiently and effectively accomplishing the mission.

“Also, when you use less people and resources in a process, it tends to save money,” he said. “At the wing level, however, most importantly, you are giving Airmen back their time by ridding the process of waste.”

Another satisfied customer is Deborah Root, 42nd Services Division Combat Support Division chief. She said the VOC allows multiple users immediate access to critical information, and it eliminates the delay and human error factor in transferring on-scene information to support response agencies.

“The VOC eliminates the headache of creating and filing multiple documents during accountability drills,” she said. “It drastically reduces the coordination process and saves resources, such as telephone lines, for more critical functions. At the end of the day, you have a perfect repository of information.”

Major Loller said another advantage of the VOC is accessibility.

“People can be at home, on temporary duty or deployed and still participate in the ‘war,’” he said. “Also, once the VOCs are in place, the system could go Air Force-wide by simply hubbing all the VOCs together.”

The major said changes on the site do not require a programmer, just plain text entries, and all information pertaining to an event is in one place. He said one drawback is that some people are worried everyone will be so concentrated on computers and the VOC, there will not be any cross-talk between members.

“Setting the program up is easy. I built one site from scratch in a day and a half,” Major Loller said. “The only problem I had was figuring out how I wanted to organize the site.”

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A Web Parts-based integration between SharePoint and the Fast ESP search platform was available shortly after Microsoft bought Fast for US$1.2 billion last year, but the new server, Fast Search for SharePoint, will go much further, having been “designed to work really well across the various workloads of SharePoint,” said Jared Spataro, director of enterprise search.

Fast Search for SharePoint will be available when Office 14 ships. Microsoft has not named a firm date for that launch.

Microsoft is also planning to release Fast Search for Internet Business in beta form during the second half of this year. The offering is aimed at customers who want to build search-driven e-commerce Web sites.

Spataro declined to provide exact pricing details, but Microsoft’s licensing structure for the new offerings appears to offer significant cost cuts for existing SharePoint Enterprise users.

Customers who buy Fast Search for SharePoint will only pay per server; client access is included in their SharePoint Enterprise client access license.

The same model will be used for another new Microsoft product called ESP for SharePoint, aimed at SharePoint Enterprise customers who want to use some ESP technology but don’t wish to wait until Office 14′s release.

Meanwhile, Fast Search for Internet Business will be licensed based on factors like queries per second and data volume, Microsoft said.

Microsoft also has two other enterprise search products, Search Server 2008 and the free Search Server 2008 Express. The company bought Fast Search & Transfer in order to gain high-end search technology that could compete with the likes of Autonomy, which recently stepped into SharePoint’s territory by announcing plans to buy content-management vendor Interwoven for $775 million.

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However, the long-anticipated new product, called FAST Search for SharePoint, won’t ship until the next version of Microsoft Office , codenamed Office 14, does, said Jared Andersen, a senior product manager for enterprise search at Microsoft.

Andersen declined to say when Office 14 would ship. Some experts expect Office 14 to ship next year .

FAST Search for SharePoint will be aimed at enterprises and designed to work “out of the box” with large SharePoint document repositories, said Andersen.

Scalability is one of the FAST software’s strongest traits. When Microsoft bought Oslo, Norway-based FAST last January, it bragged that it would become the only vendor to offer a unified enterprise search platform capable of sorting and searching through billions of documents.

By comparison, the existing search features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) have trouble handling repositories with more than 50 million documents, Ovum analyst Madan Sheina wrote last month.

The new FAST Search for SharePoint will also bring “more advanced linguistic capabilities” and “more powerful processing” of both structured and unstructured content, Microsoft’s Andersen said.

Betas for FAST Search will arrive “very much in line with Office 14′s betas,” he said. Customers will need to buy SharePoint Enterprise Client Access Licenses (CALs) in order to get the software.

In the meantime, customers who want such features now can license another new product, ESP for SharePoint.

ESP is based on FAST technology but is not specially-rewritten for SharePoint, Andersen said. Customers who buy ESP today will be able to upgrade to FAST Search for SharePoint.

Microsoft made the announcement during its FASTforward enterprise search conference , which is taking place through Wednesday in Las Vegas.

John Lervik, corporate vice-president of Microsoft Enterprise Search and former CEO of FAST, left Microsoft last month.

Also last month, two Microsoft competitors merged when Autonomy bought Interwoven for $775 million .

Microsoft will continue to separately develop the search platform in MOSS, Andersen said.

That platform serves as the foundation for two broader enterprise search products: Search Server and Search Server Express.

Search Server will become Microsoft’s mid-tier, paid enterprise search software, while Search Server Express remains its low-end, free version .

Released a year ago, Search Server Express 2008 has been downloaded 100,000 times, said Andersen. He declined to say when the next versions of those products would be available, or what features would be in them.

Microsoft doesn’t expect to make FAST the underlying platform for its entire enterprise search software lineup until about 2013, or when the version of Office after this one ships. “That’s certainly what we’re working towards,” Andersen said. He disagreed with the suggestion that this was too slow and leaving customers dissatisfied. “We’ve made tremendous progress. Customers are very interested in our roadmap, and we are being as transparent as we can,” he said. Microsoft also plans to introduce another version, FAST Search for Internet Business. That will be targeted at companies running public Web sites, and will compete with products such as Google Inc.’s Site Search. A beta of FAST Search for Internet Business will be available in the second half of this year.

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The annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study tracks a wide range of cost factors, including expensive outlays for detection, escalation, notification and response along with legal, investigative and administrative expenses, customer defections, opportunity loss, reputation management, and costs associated with customer support such as information hotlines and credit monitoring subscriptions. Other key findings from the study include the following:

Average total per-incident costs in 2008 were $6.65 million, compared to an average per-incident cost of $6.3 million in 2007.
Healthcare and financial services companies experienced the highest churn rate – 6.5 percent and 5.5 percent respectively, on a total average of 3.6 percent, which reflect the sensitivity of the data collected and the customer expectation that information will be protected.
Third-party organizations accounted for more than 44 percent of all cases in the 2008 study and are also the most costly form of data breaches due to additional investigation and consulting fees.
More than 84 percent of 2008 cases involved organizations that had had more than one data breach in 2008 – meaning that companies are becoming more experienced in managing breaches over time.
More than 88% of all cases in this year’s study involved insider negligence.
More than half of respondents believe that training and awareness programs assist in preventing future breaches and 44 percent have expanded their use of encryption.
The most significant cost decrease was seen in activities relating to post-breach response, which indicates that organizations are becoming more cost effective in managing data breaches.

“After four years of conducting this study, one thing remains constant, U.S. businesses continue to pay dearly for having a data breach,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute. “As costs only continue to rise, companies must remain on guard or face losing valuable customers in this unpredictable economy.”

The U.S. Cost of a Data Breach Study was derived from a detailed analysis of 43 data breach cases with a range of 4,200 to 113,000 records that were affected. The study found that there is a positive correlation between the number of records lost and the cost of an incident. Companies analyzed were from 17 different industries, including financial, retail, healthcare, services, education, technology, manufacturing, transportation, consumer, hotels and leisure, entertainment, marketing, pharmaceutical, communications, research, energy and defense.

Copies of the study are available via this weblink: www.encryptionreports.com

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January 28, 2009 – (Computerworld) – First released in September 2007 , PerformancePoint Server 2007′s features will in future be available via client access licenses of the enterprise version of SharePoint Server, said Kurt DelBene, senior vice-president of Microsoft’s Office Business Group, in a statement on the company’s Web site.

PerformancePoint helps managers budget, forecast, and measure profits and efficiency. It competed with software from IBM, Infor, Oracle Corp., SAP AG and SAS Institute , as well as offerings from business intelligence (BI) and ERP vendors.

The market for BPM software and services is expected to grow an average of 13% per year until 2012, to $3.24 billion, according to Forrester Research Inc.

Microsoft does not have a history of cutting and running on new products. Rather, it is known for doggedly releasing new, refined versions until the software gains market traction.

Business Intelligence product manager Kristina Kerr Microsoft’s closure of PerformancePoint was unrelated to the layoffs it made last week, as it began reviewing the software’s performance seven months ago.

“We weren’t playing to our strengths, and consequently were running into the same glass ceiling of 20% deployment that every other BI vendor is,” Kerr told Computerworld. “We thought there was a much better way to achieve our goal of ‘BI for the masses,’ which is to make these features a seamless part of how they already work with SharePoint, SQL Server or Excel.”

Kerr did say that with the “economy being what it is, customers want to do more with less, and make the most out of their IT investments.”

Microsoft’s move should make the total cost of using PerformancePoint lower, said Kerr. Formerly, to get started with PerformancePoint Server cost $50,000 — $20,000 for the license (PDF document) , another $30,000 to let users create scorecards, plus a $195 license fee for every employee using PerformancePoint.

By comparison, a license for Office SharePoint Server 2007 costs $4,424 , while enterprise licenses, which offer features in addition to PerformancePoint, will cost a total of $169 per employee.

Microsoft still plans to ship Service Pack 3 for PerformancePoint Server 2007 this summer, including new planning features.

Microsoft is holding its SOA & Business Process Conference in Redmond this week, at which it is expected to unveil its BizTalk Server 2009 enterprise connectivity software.

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January 28, 2009 – (DarkReading) – SharePoint, one of the fastest-growing applications in the Windows environment, may also be turning into one of its most serious security liabilities, according to researchers and security vendors.

The SharePoint collaboration tool, which has been licensed more than 85 million times to an estimated 17,000 companies, is one of the easiest-to-use tools in the Windows suite, experts say. In fact, it’s so simple that many employees and workgroups deploy it without even asking the IT department for help. But this ease of use has a price: Many IT organizations haven’t properly secured their SharePoint deployments, and many others don’t know what sensitive data might be stored or exchanged there.

In a survey published earlier this week and sponsored by security vendor Trend Micro, Osterman Research reported that only 60 percent of companies have deployed security tools specifically for SharePoint, while the other 40 percent are relying on traditional server and endpoint security applications. But founder and president Michael Osterman observes that SharePoint data tends to travel beyond these boundaries — SharePoint data is often shared across networks and applications, and sometimes even outside the company.

“Deploying antimalware software at the endpoint or on a server does not fully secure the SharePoint environment — the underlying database, Web pages, etc.,” Osterman says.

Osterman’s findings are supported by another study conducted by Courion, also a SharePoint security provider, back in September. In that study, Courion found that 25 percent of IT managers believed their SharePoint security was weak, or that they weren’t sure and were worried about it. Nine percent of respondents said their organizations had suffered a breach that may have been attributable to a leak of sensitive data from SharePoint.

And just last month, Microsoft patched a vulnerability in SharePoint 2008 and Search Server 2008 that might allow users to access parts of the SharePoint server and execute administrative tasks. These tasks might not allow the users to get direct access to protected information, but they could cause the server to stop responding to legitimate requests or provide attackers with additional information, such as the email addresses of users on the system, Microsoft said.

The problem, observers say, is that most companies don’t have a clear, enforceable policy for using SharePoint. In many companies, any user can set up a SharePoint site, and, often, there are no guidelines for who can access it or what data can be stored there. Some users assume that because it’s used on the company’s internal network, SharePoint data must be protected by the standard corporate security defenses, they say. In other cases, employees make the mistake of offering SharePoint access to business partners or contractors outside of the company, without taking steps to secure the exchange of data.

While Microsoft offers some basic administrative tools for restricting access to SharePoint data, many users complain that SharePoint administration is too complex and doesn’t go far enough. As a result, a number of third-party vendors are now offering software that they say provides more comprehensive SharePoint security. While vendors such as Courion, Trend Micro, Rohati, and WorldExtend offer SharePoint security tools, Exostar offers a software-as-a-service capability called ForumPass4, which is billed as a more secure collaboration tool for the aerospace and defense environments.

But before such tools can be effective, enterprises must recognize the vulnerabilities of collaborative environments, like SharePoint, and define policies for using them, said Shane Buckley, CEO of Rohati, following the publication of the company’s own study on the topic last month. That study indicates that 66 percent of companies believe their organizations need authorization enforcement policies for controlling the ability to print, store, and delete files in collaborative environments.

“The shocking truth that this survey validates is that enterprises are deploying collaboration applications with little to no security policies that can enforce access controls,” Buckley said. Such deployments may not only make organizations vulnerable to breaches, but also may jeopardize their compliance with regulatory requirements, he noted.

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The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 are:

• Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
• BASF SE, the world’s leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
• COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
• Environmental Resource Management (ERM), one of the world’s leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
• HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
• Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
• L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
• McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007.  Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).  As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years.  This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn’t use earlier versions of SharePoint at all.

Microsoft SharePoint has seen substantially increased use among well-designed intranets in recent years (In 2007, Microsoft’s own intranet was a winner, and they obviously used their own software, so the 2007 dot should be a notch lower if you consider only third-party projects.).

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