Overwhelmed my the sheer volume of email and the work assignments and stress that go along with it? Help is available. Microsoft's Leadership Forum event for June 8th will be "Getting to Zero in Your Inbox."

Link to register for the LiveMeeting event - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4949828

Speakers:

• Sally McGhee, Founder / Managing Partner
• John Wittry, Executive Consultant, McGhee Productivity Solutions

• How to Get to zero e-mails in your inbox
• How to Use a clear focus on your objectives to manage your e-mail inbox
• New and effective ways to prioritize your day
• To Free up at least an hour a day

On January 12th at 9:00 am Pacific time my boss, Jim Maloney, will be presenting along with George Tubin, a senior analyst at Tower Group, on the topic of preventing fraud in the online banking world. They'll discuss the threats, ways to protect customers, and some tools and processes that can help get the job done. It's a hot topic in the marketplace, and I think many people will find this web cast interesting from a security perspective, regardless of whether or not you work at a financial institution.

There's been a lot of talk and movement in this space in the past few months, after the FFIEC (the federal government organization that's made up on several individual federal agencies responsible for setting banking standards) issued new guidance to banks and other financial institutions that says something needs to be done to further protect online banking accounts, and that it needs to be done sooner rather that later. The emphasis of the guidance is on a defense in depth and layered security approach. Jim and George will be specifically addressing that guidance in the web cast.

You can sign up for the web cast here (uses LiveMeeting). A press release that announces the event is available here.

I know he didn't mean to (so I won't act all flattered or smug or anything), but Robert Scoble just sort of summed up the better part of my topic/category list for this-here-blog of mine, over on his blog...

I thought it would be interesting to compare his list of cool upcoming topics for the future to what's categorized or searchable right now on my site. So, I did just that and have added the links, below. Not a bad start, and it points out to me where I am falling shorter than I had realized in my content. Hey Robert, thanks for the copy.

“For the next 18 months, where are the business opportunities going to lie? Tablet PC. Bigtime. Windows Media Center. Gonna be a big deal. SmartPhones. Wanna watch how fast the Motorola MPX220 sells when it's released in the next few months? Xbox Live. You only need to say one number and everyone knows exactly the Xbox thing I'm talking about: "2." Visual Studio 2005. Tons of stuff coming there. MSN has a whole raft of things up their sleeves. And we haven't even started talking about BizTalk, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, 64-bit Windows, SBS, CRM, LiveMeeting, and OneNote, among other things.”

It also gives me a gut-check on my existing blog categories. Here they are, with the ones that apply to this posting checked:

AudioBlogging	Blogging	Humor	IT Security
Mobile	Movies	Office 2003	OneNote
Personal Stories	Random Stuff	RSS Stuff	SharePoint
Tablet PC	Tech	Things that Suck	Windows Media Technology

No sooner had AOL and Yahoo announced they were bowing out of the corporate instant messaging game, Microsoft announced that when it releases Live Communication Sever 2005, the product's ability to support other external instant messaging servers will extend to hook up with the AOL (AIM/ICQ) and Yahoo IM networks.

This is great news for business users and IT implementers. Finally instant messaging has real, broad possibilities in the enterprise for multiple forms of communication among a broad and differentiated set of users. Communication outside the firewall will become a real and worthwhile pursuit. The limits that have prevented effective use of instant messaging are slipping away, and in today's collaborative world that's a real plus.

The current version of the Microsoft's business IM server, LCS2003, can already be connected to the MSN public instant messaging network (for an additional service fee). The next version of the platform, dubbed Live Communication Server 2005, is now in beta, and it already supports a technology concept called "federation," which allows different companies (for example partner companies, or service providers and their customers) to securely interconnect their LCS servers across the Internet. LCS uses the SIP protocol (Session Initiation Protocol), which is an established public standard for initiating and conducting communications between nodes on a network.

Okay, but then what?

Of course there will need to be even more to offer in this product down the road, and once can guess at what that might mean. I like to guess because I eat this stuff and have dreams of grandeur about where these products could go and how they could grow. My bet is on better collaboration and meetings. Microsoft's recent meeting-related investments in SharePoint (meeting workspaces) and the relatively limited but growing functionality in the current IM product seem to point that way (IP phone integration, as well as white-boarding and application sharing with clients on the LAN). Recent additions and improvements are terrific, but there is certainly room for improvement on these recent advances.

In the past there was NetMeeting. More recently, Microsoft has invested heavily in building and acquiring new communication technologies, not only on the IM front, but also with its purchase of a company called Placeware, which is the technology platform driving the company's popular LiveMeeting service. Much of the same collaborative functionality you get from LiveMeeting is available in a more rudimentary way in LCS and separately on the public instant messaging networks. But, until the unified IM clients are available, the newer technologies are limited in their reach between organizations.

But services live LiveMeeting and conferencing competitors like WebEx, Genesys and others offer much more robust and powerful capabilities that could - should someone make the bold move - be made available to the corporate IT crowd behind the firewall as a part of a server such as LCS 200x, sometime in the future. It's a logical next step - by that time, more advanced services will undoubtedly be available and locating that functionality in the server behind the corporate firewall will be a logical move. Business would benefit from self-hosting a voice and data conferencing system based on IP voice and collaborative IM technology that federates with other corporate systems privately, as well as with the public networks recently announced.

At least we can hope!