2006 - May on ID Management ID management offers more than just security By: Dan McLean Globe and Mail Print Edition: May 11, 2006 B12   Business today is a world of mobile work forces, networks and scattered places where employee information is stored. Wouldn't it be great to have technology that makes it easier to manage the flow of corporate information, improve the quality of data gathered, and have a tighter rein on what users can do when it comes to computing? Identity management could be just the ticket. Think of it as a set of tools and technologies that let companies control the use of programs and other networked resources, and determine what information can or cannot be viewed, all from a central system.  Read on

2005 - July on Web Service Banking on web services By: David Carey CIO Canada  (01 Jul 2005) Vancity is one of those companies that seems to relish being a leader. Not only is the Vancouver-based credit union the largest in the country, with $9 billion in assets, it also has a Tiger Woodslike knack for winning awards. To name but a couple it has garnered in the last year, Vancity was named “Best place to work in Canada” by Maclean’s Magazine, and “Marketer of the Year” by the BC Chapter of the American Marketing Association. And the list goes on. ..... Read More

2003 - November on Storage Strategies In order to enable better remote mirroring of enterprise data, technology partners EMC Corp. and Nortel Networks Ltd. have banded together again, this time to deliver a joint business continuity service to their respective customers. Announced Tuesday at the Storage Networking World event in Orlando, Fla., the new service is designed to help corporations cost-effectively and easily take advantage of optical metropolitan area network and WAN connectivity options for off-site data mirroring. Read more.

2003 - October on Security First came Blaster, a crafty, virulent piece of malicious code that sneaked through a security hole in Microsoft software. Unlike viruses that attach themselves to e-mails and become active when users open them, worms move stealthily through the innards of computer systems without any human intervention. All told, Blaster infected 336,000 computers within 24 hours, replicating itself in a further 30,000 computers every hour, according to the U.S. clearinghouse for computer security, the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh.

2003 - September on Managing Mega Projects - presentation to Project Management Institute West Coast Chapter The discussion will centre around the complexity and challenges in managing mega projects, how they differ from other projects, management techniques and lessons learned. Sign up.

2003 - September on Security To keep danger at bay and prevent the daily nightmarish stories, threats and viruses from materializing, companies don't have any choice but to tighten up their security, says Gord Bradshaw, manager of Technical Services for Dynamic Mutual Funds Ltd. And in the financial services sector, customers expect no less. Read more.

2003 - July on Storage Strategies Data is everywhere. On the hard drives of servers, workstations and computers in head offices, branch locations and remote facilities. On the home computers of employees who telecommute or work evenings and weekends at home. On laptops and PDAs of mobile executives, sales representatives and field staff.

2003 - June on Microsoft Web Site/ Case Studies Canada's largest Credit Union, Vancouver City Savings Credit Union (VanCity), has 40 branches and seven subsidiaries throughout the province of British Columbia and Canada. The IT arm of VanCity, Inventure Solutions Inc., was facing an aging, complex mixture of technologies across the organization. Microsoft® Windows XP Professional operating system and Office XP Professional were chosen to replace the existing Windows 95 and Windows NT® Workstation 4.0 operating systems on VanCity user desktops to provide a unified operating system across the company and to help increase reliability and stability of all systems. Since deployment of the new software began, VanCity has doubled user productivity on the desktop, experienced easier inter-office collaboration, and decreased downtime and IT support costs. Read more.

2003 - July on IT Management Strategies "I thought that I had escaped," quips Paul Ingevaldson. After many years in information technology, Ingevaldson's boss at Ace Hardware Corp. invited him to trade the chief information officer's job for one outside IT. Ingevaldson agreed, and over several years held assorted non-IT jobs with the Oak Brook, Ill., hardware retailer, ending up as vice-president of Ace's international business and head of its Canadian subsidiary.

2003 - May on IT Infrastructure Strategies At its annual hardware engineering conference last month, Microsoft Corp. called on its hardware partners to jump on board with its latest move, one that could put Microsoft front and centre in the world of utility computing. During his keynote at the WinHEC conference in New Orleans, Microsoft chief software architect Bill Gates referred to a new strategy the company is calling the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which focuses on simplifying management in the enterprise data centre. The DSI is an architecture that is based on the Microsoft Software Definition Model (SDM), an XML-based technology that enables communication between Windows-based applications, operating systems and management tools. Read more.

2003 - May on Microsoft Web Site Advertising / Case Studies As an IT professional, you're being asked to do more. And do it with less. Fortunately, Windows® Server 2003 operating system is now available to help you achieve greater network productivity and reliability with less time, money and hassle than ever before.

2003 - May on Server Management Strategies Challenging. Cumbersome. Costly. These are just some of the words Tony Fernandes uses to describe data management in a decentralized computing environment — a task he's more than happy to leave behind him as he joins a growing number of financial organizations willing to challenge the distributed computing model.

2003 - May on Microsoft Advertising You're being asked to do more. You're being asked to do it with less. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system is designed to help you manage these opposing forces with powerful server consolidation capabilities that can increase efficiency, decrease man-hours, and lower your total cost of ownership.

2003 - April on Migration to .NET / Windows 2003 Case Study VanCity is Canada's largest credit union, with $8.2 billion in assets, 286,000 members, and 40 branches throughout the province of British Columbia. VanCity owns Citizens Bank of Canada, serving members across the country by telephone, ATM, and the Internet, as well as seven other subsidiaries dealing with insurance, securities, and capital investments. Inventure Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of VanCity, which acts as the information technology arm of the VanCity Group and has 140 employees.

2003 - April on Storage Strategies Microsoft Corp. is working towards desktop functionality in server environments with software that will make them easier to deploy and manage. The company recently launched a program called the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) to bring this goal into focus, but many of the specifics are still under wraps and IT managers won't see any beta releases -- let alone shipping dates -- for several years.

2003 - March on Storage Strategies With the RRSP season safely behind it, Canada's largest credit union is back on track with a project to consolidate its storage environment. Vancouver City Savings Credit Union (VanCity) said it has already completed the conversion of six branches to the two EMC Clariion CX600 that will be managed from its two data centres. By summer, it hopes to centralize the rest of its 100 data stores into one storage area network (SAN). The company said the infrastructure renewal project will triple its disk space while increasing its growth capacity 10 times over. Inventure Solutions, VanCity's whollyowned IT subsidiary, is deploying the SAN.

2003 - March on EMC Press Release EMC Canada today announced that Vancouver City Savings Credit Union (VanCity), Canada's largest credit union, enhanced its enterprise storage environment by installing EMC CLARiiON CX600's in its two data centres to consolidate its mission-critical banking and transactional systems as well as non-critical data from more than 100 data stores onto one storage area network (SAN). Now VanCity is able to execute its disaster recovery plan more efficiently and effectively, implement dual data-centre functionality, centralize its information, triple the amount of disk space, increase the growth capacity by tenfold and significantly lower costs. The savings realized from the consolidation will be translated into better product offerings and services for customers, increasing VanCity's competitive edge in the financial services marketplace.

2003 - January on Vendor Management Rowena Liang, vice-president of IT and CIO at Vancouver City Savings & Credit Union (Vancity), is mad as hell at some of her software vendors and she's — well, she's probably going to have to keep taking it. That's the way it is anymore, right? Vendors call the shots. But maybe not. While software vendors often hold the whip hand — witness Microsoft forcing enterprise users to switch to subscription licensing for Office — CIOs are starting to pay more attention to techniques for vendor management, and learning some useful ways to level the playing field.