July, 2008

Announcing the winners in the latest Best Questions contest

Our latest contest for the best questions on IT Knowledge Exchange has ended. We saw many stellar questions come through the community over the past week, and we are happy to announce the winners:

-> Lonewolfbw
-> WoodEngineer
-> Adaher
-> Littlejuanito7
-> Jortizga

Each winner will receive an IT Knowledge Exchange t-shirt.

Stay tuned; we will be announcing a new monthly questions contest very shortly. In the meantime, brush up on your question-asking skills, and keep asking your toughest questions!

Happy posting,

Jenny Mackintosh
Community Manager

Our first blog turns one year old

Hey, we just hit another milestone on IT Knowledge Exchange. Our first community member blog published its first blog post one year ago this month. Since that inaugural post on July 16, 2007, we’ve provided our members with dozens of blogs and you can now read over 2,000 blog posts on a variety of IT topics.

Curious as to which blog was the first? It was the Connectivity blog by Tony Bradley — and Tony is still blogging with us today.

Join our corner of the blogosphere and start your own blog. We’ll provide you with a blog and help you get started. We’ll also help you build a readership by promoting your blog to a large IT audience. I’m looking forward to seeing your blog on IT Knowledge Exchange. Thanks.

Community Manager

New contest: Questions for cool threads

Starting today (Thursday, July 17, 2008), submit your best questions to the IT Knowledge Exchange community for a chance to win a free IT Knowledge Exchange t-shirt. Not sure how to post? Check out our guidelines.

Next Friday, we will review all newly created questions and choose five lucky members, who will be announced on the IT Knowledge Exchange community blog and in our weekly e-mail newsletter.

If you’ve got a question that you just haven’t been able to answer, or you need a second opinion, post it on IT Knowledge Exchange! You might receive a prize — and a little taste of fame.

Happy posting,

Jenny Mackintosh
Community Manager

SOX, GLBA and HIPAA! Oh, my!

SOX. GLBA. HIPAA. FISMA. FFIEC. COBIT. COSO. ISO 27001. Do these acronyms cause your blood pressure to climb? There’s no doubt the role of IT has gotten more complicated in the last decade and there’s more to come. That’s why I’m pleased to announce a new member blog, called Regulatory Compliance, Governance and Security.

IT faces a wave of regulatory compliance laws, legislation and mandates, such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and Gramm Leach Bliley (GLBA). How do you prepare and what benchmarks and standards are used for these compliance audits? This blog will assess, analyze and dive into these topics and many more.— Charles Denyer

Join me in welcoming Charles Denyer to our IT Knowledge Exchange community. Charles’ expertise includes SAS 70 audits, Regulation AB Item 1122/1123 compliance, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance, corporate governance, regulatory compliance and security issues and trends.

I want to thank all of our bloggers on IT Knowledge Exchange. They’re a great bunch to work with and I commend them for sharing their expertise with the community. Have you considered blogging? We’ll help you start your own blog and build up a readership of your peers. Thanks.

Community Manager

The focus is on software quality assurance

I’m happy to announce a new member blog covering software quality assurance. The QA Focus blog is written by Greg Annen, veteran of 20+ years in software development, enterprise system support and IT Quality Assurance. So be sure to join Greg, as he focuses on the issues that impact software quality assurance.

Development can be fun again! Follow these guidelines for assuring quality in software development through excellence. Topics include QA best practices and processes, test automation frameworks, what to do about requirements – all things related to Quality Assurance in the software development life cycle. — Greg Annen

Don’t forget about fellow member Joe Coley’s blog on Custom Application Development. Joe also blogs on software quality issues. And finally, if you didn’t know, our sister site SearchSoftwareQuality.com is entirely devoted to software quality, so be sure to visit there for news and resources on every angle of software quality.

Be honest. You’ve thought about starting your own blog but never got around to it. Maybe now’s the time? We make it easy to get started blogging and we’ll help you grow a readership. You can even earn a little cash if you post on a regular basis. Simply fill out the short request a blog form to get started. Thanks!

Community Manager