Let’s say you’re a Google shop. You run Google everything, including Mail, Chat, Apps, Calendar, and so on.

You recently caught wind of unified communications services and how they consolidate a lot of your, well, communications, into one place. Cool, right?

A new offering from Voice Mobility lets you integrate those unified communications telephony services into your existing Google Apps set up.

This is a great little deal. First, you get your enterprise communication and productivity apps from Google for free or nearly free. Then along comes Voice Mobility and ramps up the usability by offering a ton of integrated communication services.

Microsoft Exchange server? Don’t need it. Active Directory? Skip it. Office Communications server? Not necessary.

Voice Mobility’s UCN Vmerge is integrated with the Google Apps solution suite–including:

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Contacts
• Mobile apps

All using the workplace or campus domain. It brings unified communications to complete messaging, collaboration, calendaring and presence functionality.

Enterprise clients want the ability to enable their enterprise voice and fax communications to work seamlessly with Gmail.

UCN Vmerge allows full on-premise or hosted enterprise PBX integration with a hosted personalized Gmail service.

“By integrating UCN Vmerge with Google Apps, workplace and campus customers have price-effective options for collaboration functionality. No longer are customers forced to utilize expensive on-premise solutions from providers like Microsoft for collaboration functionality.”

– Mike Seeley, Voice Mobility’s VP of Global Sales

Well said, Mike.

Here’s a run down of some of the functions offered:

• Send and receive voice and fax messages from Gmail
• Record and deposit voice conversations in Gmail
• Manage live calls from the desktop
• Click-to-dial internal and external numbers from any Google application
• Import Google Contacts into UCN Vmerge for remote access
• Utilize least-cost routing available from the enterprise PBX

Not a bad list of features. Granted, it isn’t as robust and complete as other offerings on the market. But it’s not a bad start.

People are still looking to Google to roll out its own services that cover this ground now that Grand Central is part of its offering.

PCI regulations require companies to protect credit card numbers. But first you have to know where they are.

Here’s what I’ve learned from retailers and PCI auditors about step one of PCI compliance.

It’s simple to track credit card data from the point of sale to your databases and the bank that processes the transaction.

More challenging is uncovering the nooks and crannies it falls into throughout the organization.

Depending on your business processes, credit card data could be stored on customer service PCs, inside spreadsheets in the marketing department, or on backup tapes being shipped off-premises.

As I research an upcoming feature on PCI, I’ve been speaking with a number of retailers and PCI auditors. Here are a few tips you might find useful.

1. Self assessments. CIOs are conducting internal audits of their IT teams and business units to find out who touches credit card data and where they keep it.

It’s important to get this information from all the stakeholders, particularly business units that take customer orders or use card data to analyze buying trends.

2. 3rd-party audits. It’s often instructive to bring in outside experts to help you ferret out credit card data. One auditor told me about a major grocery chain that had made significant efforts to purge card data from systems that didn’t specifically need it.

However, when he bought a pack of gum with his credit card and then reviewed the logs of the point of sale system, he found it was recording the full card number and expiration date.

Of course, third-party audits are expensive, so you have to weigh the cost against the potential fines of PCI violation—along with the risk of a malicious party getting access to that data source.

3. Use tools. One retailer bought a data leak prevention product to make sure intellectual property and other sensitive data didn’t leave the network.

He also used its discovery feature to crawl his headquarters network and remote offices for repositories of card numbers. He used the findings to approach the business units holding the data to ensure they were following IT policies for encryption.

He also crawls the network regularly for rogue data or non-compliant business units. Which brings us to…

4. Get your processes in order. 99 percent of PCI compliance revolves around having IT and business processes in place to secure card data. You have to ensure that business units understand IT policies—and that they are following them.

You may also want to tweak business processes to minimize (or eliminate) the use of credit card data wherever possible. For instance, credit card numbers can be replaced with unique identifiers to analyze customer purchases.

Is it just a marketing veneer or is IBM really getting serious about integrating the social Web into its enterprise content management stack?

Yesterday, Big Blue released details on how its collaborative toolsets help companies prepare for Web 2.0 and previewed an integration between Lotus Quickr and its FileNet P8 ECM platform.

This is good news for FileNet clients as it appears their ECM repositories might get a Web 2.0 facelift, bringing better collaboration to often siloed islands of information.

Part of the foundation for its Web 2.0 strategy is Lotus Mashups, Web-based capabilities that make it easy for companies to assemble and publish mini-applications in real time.

And in true Big Blue style, IBM is ready to enter the building and take the business.

It has positioned Global Services to capture the projected demand for enterprise 2.0 solutions and social networking with the launch of specialized consulting services.

According to the release, it will focus on emerging technologies like social computing, SOA, and the 3-D Internet to improve business performance.

The U.S. government spends $7.5 billion to classify its information each year — that’s more taxpayer dollars than we annually put into the Department of Commerce.

But over-the-top secrecy policies aren’t just an expensive governmental habit. They give the President, the military and intelligence agencies powers far beyond what our founding fathers intended.

At least that’s the case made in Robb Moss and Peter Galison’s documentary Secrecy.

Though apparently too heady and subtle for the demands of the marketplace, it hasn’t caught on with Sundance buyers yet, however the film shines valuable light on a particularly troubling trend in American governance. Read the rest of this entry…

The Recording Industry of America’s (RIAA) website was attacked – again – over the weekend.

According to numerous breaking news stories it seems a lack of proper security controls enabled some to take parts of the site down, and tweak its pages. Get serious.

It looks like a plain vanilla SQL injection vulnerability was publicized on the social news network site Reddit, and the attacking escalated from there.

The RIAA.org Web site appears fully functioning now, but that probably won’t last too long if history is any indication. During the past five years the site has reportedly been defaced and has undergone several denial-of-service attacks.

Things got really sticky a few years ago when Senator Orin Hatch proposed to give the entertainment industry the right to attack systems used by illegal file swappers.

How about a search warrant?

Other than a laugh, these more recent hacks aren’t going to push their argument against the RIAA, its lawsuits, or the demise of DRM any further.

Energy would be better placed by hounding Congress to improve the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and boycotting the purchase of DRM enabled music files and CDs.

Speaking of DRMed music files, they’re already starting their fade into oblivion.

Nearly every, if not every, major record label is already starting to release DRM-free files. In fact, defacing Web sites is about as petty as trying to sue your customer-base to save a dying business model.

Speaking of petty: why won’t the RIAA spring for the occasional server assessment?

Yahoo will support digital identity framework OpenID 2.0 in beta form January 30.

Yahoo announced this morning that it would support the technology, which allows users to consolidate their Internet identities. Plaxo and JanRain are working with Yahoo so users don’t have to create separate IDs and logins at the Web sites, blogs, and profile pages they visit — as long as the sites support OpenID 2.0.

The OpenID Foundation and community also helped create specifications to improve security and convenience of OpenID.

Users can customize OpenID identifiers on me.yahoo.com or type “www.yahoo.com” or “www.flickr.com” on sites that support the platform.

Yahoo said users will be protected by the company’s sign-in seal while they surf the Web. Web sites can also add an option to allow users to sign in with their Yahoo ID. E-mail and instant messaging addresses are withheld as users log in, and that creates a barrier to phishing or other attacks, Yahoo said.

“A Yahoo ID is one of the most recognizable and useful accounts to have on the Internet and with our support of OpenID, it will become even more powerful,”

– Ash Patel, EVP of platforms and infrastructure.

Scott Kveton, chairman of the board for the OpenID Foundation, said Yahoo’s support of “an open Web” validates the OpenID movement and immediately triples the number of people who can use OpenID. Yahoo has 248 million users.

“With Yahoo actively engaged with the OpenID Foundation and its community to promote OpenID, Yahoo’s users will be able to more easily access the many sites across the Web that support the standard, and the potential for access to Yahoo’s vast international user base will create an even more powerful incentive for additional Web sites to begin accepting OpenID users.”

– Scott Kveton, chairman of the board for the OpenID Foundation.

Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect of Plaxo, said the move also supports data portability for various Web services.

Larry Drebes, founder and VP of engineering for JanRain, said that secure, portable, digital identities are keys to advancing Web applications.

More than 120 million URLs and 9,000 sites support Open ID, created by open source developers.

Source: Yahoo! Press Release