Vendors Tout Tools, Wares At Microsoft Tech-Ed

Microsoft isn't the only vendor touting new products to the more than 11,000 developers and IT professionals attending its Tech-Ed 2004 conference, which opened Monday in San Diego.

A slew of smaller firms lined up to roll out new tools for developers pounding the pavement at the conference and trade show.

PKWare, for instance, unveiled software development kits (SDKs) aimed at developers who want to add compression and security to their Windows-based applications. Using the various kits, commercial and in-house coders can add Zip archiving functions to their applications; insert SecureZIP, PKWare's combined security and compression technology, in their software; and embed PKWare's data compression algorithms within their applications.

@stake, meanwhile, used Tech-Ed to roll out SmartRisk Analyzer, an automated analyzer that looks for and identifies security vulnerabilities in custom-created code. According to @stake, SmartRisk builds a model of the application and runs hundreds of risk analysis scans to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, and can find flaws ranging from insecure or improper use of standard libraries to backdoors. The vulnerabilities are grouped by priority and annotated in the source code for easy remediation. The analyzer supports C and C++ in Windows and Solaris, and Java J2EE.

Also on Monday, Borland released the second edition of its Borland Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net, a modeling companion to Microsoft's development environment that adds additional features, such as reverse engineering diagramming to show how objects interact, additional C# code audits, and modification tools that insure changes are carried through the code without breaking the application. Available now, Together Edition 2.0 sells for $199 per seat.Not all vendors targeted developers. Some, such as Authentica and Lightspeed, put the Tech-Ed forum to good use by touting new products aimed at the general IT audience.

Digital rights supplier Authentica announced it would support Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services as it expands RMS capabilities in its own enterprise solutions. Among the features Authentica plans to add to RMS in its enterprise digital rights management offerings are mandatory policy enforcement for e-mail and Office files, mapping of rights policies to specific network folders for enforcement by RMS, and integrating e-mail gateways from the likes of Trend Micro, Tumbleweed, SurfControl, and NetIQ so that those solutions can scan e-mail and attachments, then apply RMS' policies.

Lightspeed Systems launched its Total Traffic Control 5.0, the newest edition of its all-Windows network security software. The updated software uses shared databases -- customers can opt out if they choose -- to detect and defend against network intrusions, viruses, and spam, the company said. Other additions to version 5.0 include file integrity checking, client-side protection, and host- and network-based intrusion prevention at the gateway. Total Traffic Control sells for $10,000.

Business Objects unveiled its Crystal Enterprise Live Office, which lets Microsoft Office embed live reports and report components in the 2000, 2002, and 2003 editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The add-on to the San Jose, Ca.-based business intelligence vendor's Crystal Enterprise Professional offers a navigational bar within Office's applications to access data in existing Crystal reports from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook, then allow users to reuse pieces of the reports -- such as tables, charts, and graphics -- in their Office documents.

Computer Associates debuted an integrated suite called CA Management Bundle for Microsoft Exchange that tackles a variety of chores for mail server managers, including performance tweaking, security, and backup. The new bundle combines technologies from CA's Unicenter, eTrust, and BrightStor lines to monitor Exchange server performance; resolve pending problems; backup and restore documents, folders, and mailboxes in Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003; and display all Exchange servers' status.And Winternals used Tech-Ed to launch Defrag Manager 3.0, an enterprise-wide tool for defragging all or some of the systems' drives on a corporate network. Administrators can schedule defragmentation of a single system, a group of PCs, an Active Directory Organizational Unit, or an entire domain. Remote systems can be set to optimize their drives at boot-up, and laptops can be forced to defrag on schedule even if they're currently disconnected from the network.