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Stories by Robert L. Mitchell

  • Mohawk Fine Papers builds integration-in-the-cloud

    Just two weeks after Mohawk Fine Papers made the decision to sell its products on Amazon.com, integration work was complete, connections to its ERP system lit up and sales started rolling in. "Amazon generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue immediately," says <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/344513/Paul_Stamas_vice_president_of_IT_Mohawk_Fine_Papers">Paul Stamas</a>, vice president of IT at the $83 million, 725-employee manufacturer of premium papers.

  • Economy delays Windows 7 implementation

    Computerworld's survey about corporate Windows 7 implementation plans ran online from August 11, 2011 to September 14, 2011. Most of the questions and answers appear below. (The main story about Windows 7 implementation plans being delayed <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220849/Windows_7_is_on_a_slow_roll&amp;pageNumber=1">appears here</a>.)

  • Windows 7 is on a (slow) roll

    Jim Thomas, director of IT operations at Pella Corp., expected to be wrapping up his Windows 7 deployment by now. The window and door maker, an early adopter of Microsoft's latest Windows PC operating system, began deployment in February 2009, just four months after the product shipped. Plans called for half of Pella's 5,000 desktop and laptop users to transition by the end of 2010, with the rest following by this December.

  • Grocer goes with thin clients

    Ian Cawson faced a hard deadline: Have a PC strategy in place for the Manchester, England-based retailer's 14 corporate offices, and have it ready when the new head office, a green building, opens in 2012. There wasn't time to conduct a full discovery process and gather all of the business requirements. "Best practices in this instance went out the window because of the time scales, and we knew it had to be done without business impact," he says.

  • Display tech to watch this year: Multitouch catches fire

    Touch-screen panels have been around for more than a decade, but it was the 2007 introduction of a multitouch screen in Apple's iPhone that galvanized the market. Now the business is going gangbusters -- as are the innovations that touch-screen manufacturers hope will build on Apple's success.

  • Will touch screens kill the keyboard?

    Thanks to a handful of emerging technologies, virtual touch-screen keyboards are getting closer to the feel of real electromechanical keyboards. Enhancements such as tactile feedback and surfaces that change to mimic physical keys could eventually redefine the virtual keyboard experience for millions of users of devices ranging from smartphones to tablets and touch-screen PCs.

  • The scary side of virtualization

    At the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders conference in March, one CIO stood up to express his unease about the security of a virtual infrastructure that has subsumed more than half of his company's production servers. Two other IT executives chimed in with their own nagging worries.

  • Ice balls help data center go green

    Green isn't usually the first color that comes to mind when one visits the hot, dry desert climate of Phoenix, where temperatures recently topped 109 degrees. But that's exactly where I/O Data Center has opened a 180,000-square-foot commercial data center collocation facility that couples an energy-efficient design with the use of innovative green technologies. Those range from an unusual setup for its air handlers to its server-rack design.

  • Cloud promises savings, delivers speed

    In the time it takes to get a cup of coffee, any one of the hundreds of engineers and developers at mobile computing chip-maker Qualcomm Inc. can provision himself a new server -- one that's fully configured with compute, storage, networking, middleware and other resources. "You can get something provisioned within 15 minutes," says Matthew Clark, senior director of IT.