A bug in version 2409 of Microsoft 365 can cause Word documents to be deleted instead of saved, Microsoft has warned. The bug affects files that contain the # character or have file extensions in uppercase, such as .DOCX or .RTF.
Until the company releases a permanent fix, users are being urged to check whether missing files they thought had been saved instead wound up in the Recycle Bin.
An alternative solution is to roll back Microsoft 365 to an older version, according to Bleeping Computer.
Europe’s Digital Markets Act is just one of a series of regulatory actions that are forcing Apple to open up its platforms. I caught up with Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran to get his fix on what IT admins – especially those who manage Apple devices — need to think about as the company’s platforms are forced open by regulation.
The first thing to consider? It’s not just Apple that’s affected. “The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is reshaping the landscape for all the major tech players,” Pavithran said. “Companies like Meta, Alphabet, and ByteDance have also been deemed ‘gatekeepers’ under the DMA.”
That means enterprises that rely on any of those platforms for business need to be aware and watchful for fast change. Managing changes as they go into effect becomes an additional task of time.
What benefits exist? The idea that users might gain more browser actions and more opportunity for choice and customization is one thing, but it is a big thing. While consumer users might opt for whatever option they want, those users in the enterprise could inadvertently create problems.
As a result, Apple admins “must account for potential compatibility issues, security vulnerabilities, and user experience consistency,” Pavithran said. Beyond simple research, admins will have to identify new ways to manage and monitor these expanded choices. “My advice? Tread carefully,” he said.
Admins need to be proactive and adopt multiple layers to minimize any potential impacts. “This includes implementing endpoint management solutions, conducting regular audits, restricting non-vetted applications, and deploying automated threat detection systems,” Pavithran said. “Keeping firmware and apps updated, along with comprehensive employee education, will be crucial in this more open environment.
“Vigilance and adaptability are key.”
Pavithran knows that some enterprises have wanted more flexibility when it comes to app and service use and management on Apple platforms, and the move toward more openness might actually help there. But there’s a risk that such flexibility could compromise security and privacy, both of which are big reasons Apple’s platform sees so much use in the enterprise.
“If Apple manages this correctly, we could see its presence in the enterprise grow even further, as companies now have more control over which apps and services they can use on managed devices,” Pavithran said. “But, it should be said, these changes demand greater attention and focus from admins, and they may benefit from a unified console to enjoy such enhanced flexibility without sacrificing security or privacy.”
The introduction of support for third-party browsers could be another issue for enterprise admins. “Admins will need to evaluate each browser’s security protocols, compatibility with enterprise software, and adherence to corporate policies,” he said.
“This is the million dollar question,” said Pavithran. “We know that Apple will try its best to not let these changes get in the way of security and user experience. And we also know that Apple is prepared to introduce new protections on the back of enforced changes.”
Pavithran pointed to app notarization and other tools Apple has introduced in an attempt to ensure its customers are protected against rogue developers and payment systems. Well-intended as those attempts might be, “Europe isn’t making things easy for Apple,” he said, pointing to recent proceedings the bloc has taken against Apple.
The problem is that each new regulation and each new demand for further compromise serve to limit what Apple can do to protect its platforms. “Whatever happens next, the challenge will lie in how well Apple can balance this openness with the core values that make its ecosystem trusted and secure,” he explained.
The Hexnode CEO joins the ever-growing chorus of voices who see Apple’s reach in enterprise computing on the rise. “We’ve seen Apple’s enterprise growth really take off, driven by their commitment to security, privacy, and seamless device integration. Despite the shifting regulatory landscape, I don’t see this slowing down,” he said.
“As Apple continues to innovate and address enterprise concerns, expect adoption to accelerate further.”
When it comes to balancing Apple’s reluctant openness with enterprise needs, what awareness should guide IT admin decisions?
“IT should be vigilant but not overly restrictive,” said Pavithran. “Openness doesn’t automatically mean insecurity, but it does require more nuance. Stay informed about potential risks, align decisions with specific security protocols, and be aware of user behavior and the evolving threat landscape.”
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My fellow Android phone-owners, start your feature-seeking engines: Some significant new security strengtheners on are their way to your device(s) — and quite possibly already there and just waiting to be discovered.
Surprise, surprise — eh? But oh, it be true: While we’ve been off gazing at grass and thinking about gibbons (or whatever it is you do with your downtime), Google’s been quietly sending out an under-the-hood, almost unnoticeable update that unlocks some serious new theft protection muscle.
The rollout revolves around a system-level service called Google Play Services — which means the update gets served by the regular ol’ Google Play Store and consequently reaches every compatible device, no matter who made it or which carriers might be involved, as soon as Google sends it. So, none of the delays we see with full-fledged Android version updates, in other words (huzzah!).
This specific slice o’ software sorcery is being sent to all Android devices running 2019’s Android 10 or higher. If you’re using a phone that’s running an Android version any older than that — well, my friend, you’ve got far bigger security issues to worry about than this.
But with Android 10 or higher, quite literally all you need to do is a teensy bit of gentle jabbing to surface this trio of noteworthy new Android security settings, flip all the right switches, and make your phone and all the data within it a healthy bit safer out in the wild.
[Get advanced Android tips in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter. Three new things to know and try every Friday — straight from me to you.]
Lemme show ya how.
First things first, let’s take a closer look at exactly what these features are and why they matter — shall we?
Back in May, y’see, Google announced a whole slew of new Android security features designed to help deter device theft and better protect data if a phone is, in fact, stolen.
Three pieces of the puzzle in particular were promised for that always-popular “later this year” window:
Easy peasy, right? And really, there’s no reason you wouldn’t want to fire these features up — especially when you’re using an Android device for Very Important Business™ and/or with any manner of sensitive personal doings.
So far, the first two of these features — Theft Detection Lock and Offline Device Lock — appear to be actively rolling out to Android devices all around the world. And that includes not only Google’s own Pixel phones but also phones and tablets sold by Samsung and other device-makers.
Notably, though, they’re all off by default — so even once they reach you, it’s up to you to find and enable ’em. And you’ve really gotta dig a little to do it.
The good news is that none of this takes terribly long to do — once you know where to look. So clear out roughly 20 seconds in your schedule, and let’s find these things for ya, shall we?
First, if you’re using a Pixel or another device that mostly follows Google’s standard Android interface:
JR Raphael, IDG
If you’re using a Samsung-made phone, meanwhile:
JR Raphael, IDG
If you’re using an Android phone by any other manufacturer and neither of those paths works for you, try poking around in the equivalent security section of your settings for something related to theft protection — or try searching your system settings for that phrase.
And if you just aren’t seeing anything yet, don’t panic. This update is actively rolling out as we speak, and while it’s absolutely showing up in some places already — including on a variety of Pixels in my possession as well as an older Galaxy phone I’ve got in front of me — as with any Google rollout, it’s likely happening in waves, to minimize the risk of something going wrong and affecting a ton of people at once. And that means it may take a few days or even weeks to reach everyone.
Long story short: Give it a day or two, then check back again. It’ll show up for you soon!
Once you do see the section in question, all that’s left is to tap it — then activate the options within.
JR Raphael, IDG
As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve only got two out of three of the features available as of this moment. That’s the case on every phone I’ve checked, so it seems like the third feature — Remote Lock — may be rolling out separately and slightly later.
But at the very least, you should be able to activate Theft Detection Lock and Offline Device Lock soon, if not this instant. And you can set yourself a reminder to look for any missing elements once a week or so until they show up for you.
With any luck, you’ll never actually need any of these features in any real-world scenario. But if such a situation ever does arise, you’ll be glad you took the time to activate ’em — and either way, you’ll be able to rest a teensy bit easier knowing your data has that extra layer of protection on top of all the other Android security steps you’ve taken.
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The European Court of Justice has decided that Facebook owner Meta must minimize the amount of personal data it uses for personalized ads, the BBC reports . The decision from the EU’s top court means that only a small part of Meta’s data collection can be used for advertisements.
The ruling stems from a complaint by privacy activist Max Schrems, who said Facebook used data about his sexual orientation for targeted ads — even though Schrems himself had not shared information about his sexual orientation on the platform.
Meta said it does not use so-called specially categorized data linked to sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, state of healt,h or religion for personalized ads. Such data is classified as sensitive and EU data protection legislation has strict requirements for processing it. The company says it takes privacy very seriously and would have further comment after it reviews the ruling.
The concept of data leakage — and all of its privacy, legal, compliance and cybersecurity implications — today has to be fundamentally re-envisioned, thanks to the biggest IT disruptor in decades: generativeAI (genAI).
Data leakage used to be straight-forward. Either an employee/contractor was sloppy (leaving a laptop in an unlocked car, forgetting highly-sensitive printouts on an airplane seat, accidentally sending internal financial projections to the wrong email recipient) or because an attacker stole data either while it was at rest or in transit.
Those worries now seem delightfully quaint. Enterprise environments are entirely amorphous, with data leakage just as easily coming from a corporate cloud site, a SaaS partner, or from everyone’s new-favorite bugaboo: a partner’s large language model (LLM) environment.
Your enterprise is responsible for every bit of data your team collects from customers and prospects. What happens when new applications use your old data in new ways? And what then happens when that customer objects? What about when a regulator or a lawyer in a deposition objects?
When the walls are this amorphous, how precisely is IT supposed to be in control?
Consider this scary tidbit. A group of Harvard University students started playing with digital glasses to leverage real-time data access. The most obvious takeaway from their experiment is it that it can be a highly effective tool for thieves (conmen, really). It allows someone to walk up to a stranger and instantly know quite a bit about them. What a perfect way to kidnap someone or steal their money.
Imagine a thief using this tool to talk his/her way into a highly-sensitive part of your office? Think about how persuasive it could make a phishing attack.
As bad as that all is, it’s not the worst IT nightmare — that nightmare is when the victim later figures out the misused data came from your enterprise database, courtesy of a detour through a partner’s LLM.
Let’s step away from the glasses nightmare. What happens when an insurance company uses your data to deny a loan or your HR department uses the data to deny someone a job? Let’s further assume that it was the AI partner’s software that made a mistake. Hallucinations anyone? And that mistake led to a destructive decision. What happens then?
The underlying data came from your confidential database. Your team shared it with genAI partner 1234. Your team hired 1234 and willingly gave them the data. Their software screwed it up. How much of this is your IT department’s fault?
There is a terrible tendency of litigation to split fault into percentages and to give a healthier percentage to the entity with the deepest pocket. (Hello, enterprise IT — your company quite likely has the deepest pocket.)
There are several ways to deal with these scenarios, but not all of them will be particularly popular.
1. Contractual — put it in writing. Have strict legal terms that put your AI partner on the hook for anything it does with your data or any fallout. This won’t prevent people from seeing the inside of a courtroom, but at least they’ll have company.
2. Don’t share data. This is probably the least popular option. Set strict limits on which business units can play with your LLM partners, and review and approve the level of data they are permitted to share.
When the line-of-business chief complains — virtually guaranteed to happen — tell that boss that this all about protecting that groups’ intellectual property and, in turn, that LOB chief’s bonus. Mention that this preserves their bonus and watch the objections melt away.
3. Impose stiff punishments for Shadow AI violations. In theory, you can control contacts and data access with your key genAI partners. But if your people start feeding data into ChatGPT, Perplexity or their own account on CoPilot, they need to know that they will be discovered and that two violations mean termination.
First, you need to take this request up as high as you can to get in writing that it will happen. Because, trust me, if you say that a second violation will result in termination, and then some top-tier salesperson violates and does not get fired, wave bye-bye to your credibility. And with that, any chance people will take your rules seriously. Don’t threaten to fire someone until you are certain you can.
Maybe something equally effective would be canceling their next two bonus/commission payments. Either way, find something that will get the attention of the workforce.
4. The anti-contract. Lawyers love to generate 200-page terms of service that no one reads. I just need to remind you that such terms will be ignored by courtroom juries. Don’t think you can really right-click your legal exposure away.
This is triply the case when your customers are outside the United States. Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan, among others, focus on meaningful and knowing consent. Sometimes, you are banned from forcing acceptance of the terms if you choose to use the product/service.
5. Compliance. Do you even have legal permission to share all of that data with an LLM partner? Outside the US, most regulators are told that customers own their data, not the enterprise. Data being mis-used — as in the Harvard glasses example — is one thing. But if your genAI partner makes a mistake or hallucinates and sends flawed data out into the world, you can be exposed to pain well beyond simply sharing too much info.
You can never have too many human-in-the-loop processes in place to watch for data glitches. Yes, it will absolutely dilute genAI efficiency gains. Trust me: for the next couple of years, it will deliver a better ROI than genAI will on its own.
Window management on Macs gets an upgrade with macOS Sequoia, which introduces window tiling and makes it much easier to work on tasks within multiple applications by arranging windows as you please.
Windows users moving to a Mac (and there’s an ever increasing number of those) will have come across this before. Window tiling is a great way to maximize the value of your available desktop space, even when working with multiple displays.
Announcing the feature at WWDC in June, Apple explained: “New ways to arrange windows let users stay organized with the layout that works best for them. By simply dragging a window to the edge of the screen, macOS Sequoia automatically suggests a tiled position on the user’s desktop. Users can release a window right into place, quickly arrange tiles side by side, or place them in corners to keep even more apps in view. And new keyboard and menu shortcuts help organize tiles even faster.”
In essence, it really is (almost) as simple as that, once you learn how it’s used.
Perhaps reflecting that individual productivity relies on slightly different working patterns, there are several ways to tile windows:
Window tiling means you can organize one or more applications easily, one app may be in one window or one full screen window. One or more applications can be visible in two windows alongside each other, three windows with one large window and two sharing half the screen, or four application windows. You can also have windows one above the other. One caveat is that some application developers (including Apple with News) have set window sizes for their apps that don’t let you see everything in one of these views.
This is how each method works:
Drag an application window to the edge of your display — it can be the top, left, or right, or even any corner — and a highlighted area should appear in the region in which your window sits. Release the window and it will snap into position once your pointer reaches the edge of the screen; don’t be impatient as the Mac responds to the position of your cursor to decide where the window is placed.
A faster way to get your windows in order is to press the Option key while dragging the window toward the top, left, or right edge of the screen and release that window once it is in the highlighted area. It will snap into place, though if you intend on placing four windows you must move the cursor all the way to the corner.
When in an application window, hover the pointer over the green button. A menu will appear offering you several window options, four in Move & Resize and another four in a section called Fill & Arrange. To see any available additional layouts tap the Option key.
While working in an application, choose Window in the Menu bar and choose one of these options:
You can also center the active window on the desktop, enter full screen view or fill the desktop with the active window using options in the menu.
Power users will want to learn the following keyboard shortcuts for window tiling on the Mac.
You can disable some of the ways used to invoke windows tiling; this can be useful if you rely on other Mac gestures within your existing workflow. You can get to windows tiling controls in System Settings > Desktop & Dock, then explore the Windows section, where you will find three options:
The first two options let you enable or disable some of the windows tiling user interfaces, while the third option lets you get rid of that bit of space inserted between windows when working with them.
If you don’t want to use window tiling on your Mac you can also turn it off in the Windows section which you will find in System Settings >Desktop & Dock.
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Dark Matter’s powerful fictional short film based on real events, Butterfly, goes inside the experience of a small business as its world is turned upside down by ransomware.
It’s an experience shared by a growing number of small businesses – half experienced some form of cybersecurity breach or attack in the last 12 months.
Yet not all want to tell their story, or even report they’ve been attacked. This helps propagate the myth that small businesses don’t need the same protection as larger firms.
“Small businesses, maybe ten years ago, were not such attractive targets” explains Jake North, Product Manager for Consumer & Small Business Security Software at Dell Technologies.
“The tools and the technologies that attackers would use weren’t so sophisticated – they weren’t able to do so much – and there was a bit of an epidemic failure to understand the value of the information that small businesses had.”
This has changed, and the problem is compounded by the fact that small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), working with limited IT resources, are usually less aware of and prepared for attacks.
“Large organizations tend to report that they’ve had more” says Steve Furnell, Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Nottingham, “but that’s not necessarily because they’re larger organisations and a bigger target, but because they have more capability to identify what’s going on.”
Today’s cybercriminal organisations aren’t always targeting specific companies or types of business. Their sophisticated tools spread widely, probing for vulnerabilities, and they harness email phishing campaigns as well as compromised apps or websites.
“The IT threat landscape has evolved massively,” says Martin Pivetta, Director of Product Management for small business at McAfee. “The cybercrime business is bigger than the drug crime business nowadays, and it’s more anonymous. These organisations are set up with very big structures and act in a very professional way.”
This puts small businesses in the firing line, even if they might not seem as juicy a target as larger corporations.
“If you are able to harness, shall we say, a thousand small businesses” notes Furnell, “you’re going to get a fair amount of money from that collectively, and perhaps with less resistance.”
So, what can small businesses do?
“Make sure that employees are aware of scams and what to look out for,” says Pivetta. “Get the basic training done with them. If you don’t know how to do that, resources are available on the Internet and from the McAfee website.”
Secondly, Pivetta suggests businesses should “make sure you have basic protection across your whole business, for your devices, for your mobile devices, and for your employees”.
Doing so doesn’t have to be onerous or expensive.
“There are a number of risks that are pervasive and scary,” says North, “and small businesses can spend a lot of time and a lot of money remediating those risk, but they do not have to.”
He points small business owners to McAfee Business Protection, a simplified, highly-automated security suite.
Available exclusively at Dell, on Dell business PCs, it takes businesses step-by-step through encrypting hard drives and installing software to set up a high-level, frontline defence.
It then leaves business leaders to focus on their core activities rather than security, while ensuring they maintain awareness.
As North puts it: “McAfee is very good at providing the advice, then helping you to act on that to make sure it gets done, then monitoring to make sure that your employees are following these policies so that, if your employee does something that’s risky, you get a notification.’
Watch the full Butterfly film or learn more about McAfee Business Protection now.
Many people think of digital whiteboards as a simple adjunct to their videoconferencing software, an online space where remote and in-office participants — often software developers — can brainstorm, post ideas, and create simple diagrams on a whiteboard “canvas” using basic text and drawing tools. But with the current crop of dedicated tools, those are table stakes.
Today’s advanced, dedicated digital whiteboard software tools can serve much broader audiences and a wider range of use cases. “Think of these as visual collaboration tools. It’s definitely filling an unmet need,” says Chris Trueman, senior principal analyst at Gartner.
At their most basic, digital whiteboards provide a shared interactive space where participants collaborate by typing notes or sketching on the canvas. In addition to colored “sticky notes” you can post to the digital canvas, digital whiteboard applications can pull in rich media assets such as images, video, and audio files; offer diagramming and annotation tools; and include features that encourage audience engagement, such as reviews, voting, and crowdsourcing ideas.
Unlike notes jotted on a physical whiteboard in a meeting room, a digital canvas can be saved and later revisited, edited, expanded, and shared with additional collaborators, both inside and outside the company. Although these tools are often used for real-time collaboration, they can also be used asynchronously, a plus for organizations with employees in different time zones.
Many digital whiteboards offer APIs or integrations with other enterprise apps, including office suites and project management platforms. Some vendors offer designer or developer modes where you can hand off elements of the whiteboard based on roles at different stages of the process. “For example, developers working on a new mobile app could share their coding work with UI designers and work back and forth to show what happens when you, say, click a button,” says Trueman.
Going beyond their core collaboration function, digital whiteboards can be also used for interactive presentations with active audience participation. For example, “Some manufacturing companies in the fashion industry use these tools to lay out their upcoming lineup for, say, their spring collection,” says Trueman. When used with traditional meeting software, digital whiteboards can add freshness to online meetings, helping to avoid “Zoom fatigue,” he adds.
Canvases generally aren’t portable from one whiteboarding tool to another, which can be a problem if your organization is using more than one vendor’s software. They can, however, be exported as PDF, CSV, or image files.
Enterprise use of digital whiteboards escalated during the Covid pandemic. Although it has subsided a bit since then, it’s still higher than it was in 2019 due to a sustained increase in remote work, Trueman says. And many organizations have expanded their use of the tools beyond software development teams as they’ve come to realize that digital whiteboards can increase productivity for a variety of workers, such as designers, engineers, educators, operations experts, and project managers, and as an enhancement to sales and other presentations.
Pure-play digital whiteboard vendors are also beginning to introduce AI-based features into their products. Today these mostly focus on summarization and categorization of whiteboard content, but the market is rapidly evolving to include new features for text generation, insertion, replacement, and translation, says Trueman. “We’re seeing additional AI use for brainstorming activities, where you have a mind map diagram and AI will expand the tree,” he says.
In response, traditional meeting software vendors such as Zoom, Microsoft, and Cisco haven’t been standing still. Many vendors in the unified communications space have begun adding new features to their basic whiteboarding tools, and Microsoft has added templates to the Microsoft Whiteboard app in its Microsoft 365 suite to help users get started.
“As the meeting providers increase features, pure-play vendors have to focus more on verticals,” Trueman says. iObeya has responded by adding features tailored to visual management and manufacturing, while Lucid Software has added new features tuned for engineers and developers. For example, AI may enable users to generate code from natural language sentences, to generate or alter existing images, or to assist with mind mapping.
While unified communications vendors are shooting for “good enough” in their whiteboard tools, says Gartner’s Market Guide for Visual Collaboration Applications report, “…unified communications and cloud-office vendors’ visual collaboration applications trail the specialized vendors in this market by a significant margin of capabilities and may never be as complete, barring a significant acquisition for more complex needs.”
The tradeoff, says Trueman, is that the pure play tools can be relatively expensive. Prices range from under $10 per month to as much as $75 per month per seat for some enterprise licenses. Most vendors offer trial versions that are either feature or time limited.
Digital whiteboard tools typically include a wide range of templates to get users started and avoid what Trueman calls “the blank page canvas problem.” They serve as “a springboard to productivity.” Review what templates are available and make sure there are examples for all your use cases, he advises. For example, is there a mind mapping template for brainstorming? Project management? Engineering? Also, check to see whether the vendor has templates that are tailored to your vertical, such as manufacturing or software development.
Compatibility with the existing digital whiteboard hardware-based systems in your conference rooms is key, and “that’s not fully addressed by vendors,” Trueman says, so review which systems will work with your hardware and what features are supported — or not supported. While many digital whiteboard software vendors work with partners to support the devices, they don’t design their own hardware. “So if you have Microsoft Surface Hub in a conference room, make sure the digital whiteboard app will work with that.”
Privacy and security features are another important consideration. Can you use the product on premises, or if in the cloud, where will your data be hosted? Some products support audit trails, support permission-based access, and can comply with data retention policies. Enterprise versions should include single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and data encryption features, as well as compliance with FedRAMP, GDPR, and other standards specific to the buyer’s industry.
AI-based capabilities in these tools are rapidly evolving, so check with prospective vendors to see what’s on offer — and what’s planned for release in the near future. New features, such as summarization and categorization, may increase productivity during whiteboarding sessions.
Start by assessing your use cases. How many groups in your organization could benefit from using digital whiteboards? Be sure to include all stakeholders in a discussion before moving forward.
What features do you need to support your use cases? For software design work, for example, look for features that provide ways to write code in the digital whiteboard system as well as to review and annotate the content, says Trueman.
Where does your data need to be stored, geographically, for privacy and compliance purposes?
Do you have specific needs for your vertical market? If so, some tools may have targeted features, such as industry-specific templates, that you can use.
Are the digital whiteboarding features included in your online meeting software or office suite good enough for your organization’s needs? The cost for pure-play solutions is significant, so make sure you really need more than the whiteboarding functions that are included with software you’re already paying for.
Do your meetings include on-site conference room participants as well as remote workers? If so, be sure that your conference room systems, such as touchscreen digital whiteboards, will work with the digital whiteboard software you choose.
Once you’ve nailed down your organization’s needs and who the stakeholders are, it’s time to review what the vendors offer. Here are questions to ask about both core and extended features you may want to consider.
Gartner doesn’t have a Magic Quadrant for digital whiteboard software vendors, but some names come up more often with clients, says Trueman. These include Figma, Lucid, Miro, and Mural.
The companies listed below represent a sampling of the more than two dozen digital whiteboard software tools, also called visual collaboration platforms, available today. (Digital whiteboard tools that are included as a feature in traditional online meeting software are not listed.) Here’s a quick summary of each tool.
Bluescape focuses on security with its on-premises and cloud-based virtual workspace tool offerings. Its drag-and-drop interface lets you bring images, graphics, videos, live streams, and documents into a shared whiteboard from local storage or file storage services such as Google Drive, Box, and OneDrive. It features “canvas carousels” for presentations and includes an API for workflow automation.
Bluescape boasts “military-grade security” with what it calls an “air-gapped communication suite” and compliance with DoD IL4 ATO, FedRamp, and ISO 270001 standards. Prices are not disclosed on the website; visitors must fill out an online form.
This Swiss company describes Collaboard, its eponymously named product, as a place to collect ideas, plan and execute projects. It offers an infinitely large whiteboard canvas onto which you can place text, drawings, sticky notes, images, videos, and audio. It offers more than 150 templates in areas such as agile, brainstorming, strategy and planning, diagramming, and tables. Users can pin content, vote on it, and rate it.
Administrative features include single sign-on, support for Active Directory, access controls, version control, permission management, and audit logs. The software can reside on premises or as a cloud service, with data residing in Germany, Switzerland, or the Netherlands. Its many integrations include Teams, WebEx, and Jira. Collaboard has a limited free edition, and paid versions start at $10/user/mo. Enterprise, education, and public-sector packages are also available.
Figma describes FigJam as a team collaboration tool for diagramming, brainstorming, agile workflows, meetings and workshops, and strategy and planning functions with a focus on project management, engineering, and product management. It makes prominent use of sticky notes, which can be organized into “themes.” AI features can sort and summarize information; generate templates, visualizations, and design mockups; rewrite text; and create interactive prototypes from design mockups.
FigJam supports SAML SSO, 2FA, and domain capture; encrypts data in transit and at rest; maintains SOC 2 Type II compliance; and complies with GDPR and CCPA. Pricing ranges from $0 for the starter plan up to $75/seat/mo. for the full-featured enterprise version.
iObeya, based in France, bills itself as a “visual management platform supporting lean and agile ways of working,” with a focus on lean project management, lean manufacturing, agile, and the pharmaceuticals industry. It includes an API and supports Microsoft Power Automate, with integrations for Atlassian’s Jira and ADO, as well as Microsoft 365.
The product is ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified; supports enterprise-grade encryption; supports SSO with Azure AD, Google, IBM Verify, Okta, and OneLogin; and is available in on-premises and single-tenant cloud versions. Pricing ranges from approximately $4/user/mo. to $40/user/mo. for a full enterprise license.
The Klaxoon Work Collaboration Platform includes a wide variety of templates in areas such as HR, training, sales, agile, project management, and IT. It includes a developer platform as well as integrations for a variety of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Jira applications. Klaxoon offers enterprise-grade data encryption and supports SSO via Azure AD, Google, Okta, and other platforms. Prices start at $25/user/mo. A limited, free trial version is also available.
Lucid Software’s Lucidspark is a popular choice for engineering and software development. It comes bundled with the company’s Lucidchart software for creating diagrams. It includes a wide range of templates covering areas such as brainstorming, project planning, research, sprint planning, kanban boards, strategic visioning, and education. The software includes AI features to generate, sort, and summarize ideas that users can then vote on, and it can generate diagrams from text descriptions.
Lucidspark integrates with more than three dozen apps and platforms, including Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Google Workspace. Lucid offers a free starter with paid versions beginning at $13.50/user/mo.
Microsoft Whiteboard, included with the Microsoft 365 suite and available as a web, Windows, and mobile app, works closely with its Teams chat and meeting app. As an app in its own right, Whiteboard is more fully featured than tools built into other meeting platforms, and Microsoft has added about 60 templates for general areas such as problem solving, design and research, brainstorming strategy, project planning, and retrospectives. AI-based automatic visualization, categorization, and summarization features are available through Microsoft’s Copilot tool, which requires a separate subscription.
The basic editing tools support inserting text, sticky notes, shapes, and images. If that’s all you need and you already have the Microsoft 365 suite, look no further.
Miro markets itself as “the AI-powered visual workspace.” Its online service includes more than 100 templates that focus on mind mapping, product planning, customer journey mapping, technical diagramming, wireframing, strategy and planning, process mapping, retrospectives, and general whiteboarding. Miro’s “AI Sidekicks,” embedded into its templates, help users create documents, diagrams and images, and to build briefs and summaries from content posted on the whiteboard canvas.
Miro provides an audit trail for retention, disposition, and trash policies; offers more than 100 integrations; complies with nine security certifications; and supports encryption through the AWS Key Management Service. Miro offers a limited, free edition and a business version for $8/user/mo. Pricing for the enterprise-level licensing is available upon request.
Mural’s “visual work platform” offers both infinite and resizable canvas options, a variety of mapping and diagramming tools, flexible permissions options, and the ability to create and share custom templates. The company promotes Microsoft Copilot-enabled AI capabilities that can automatically expand mind map diagrams, generate text and categorize sticky notes by topic, and summarize content.
Mural offers a centralized admin console and supports single sign-on and two-factor authentication, encryption, audit logs, e-discovery and reporting tools, and the ability to expire links. It complies with SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and Microsoft 365 security certifications as well as GDPR and CCPA regulations. A free limited version lets you kick the tires. Business-grade licensing starts at $18/user/mo.
The Stormboard digital whiteboard offers agile teams tight integration with Jira, Rally, and Azure DevOps. Its StormAI feature can create custom templates based when the user describes the outcome and goal for a new workspace. It can summarize and group sticky tags by theme or sentiment and can export content to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as well as Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Other features include idea voting and task assignments.
Stormboard includes an array of enterprise-grade security features, such as single sign-on, 256-bit SSL encryption and GDPR and SOC2 compliance. It also offers data residency options and single-tenant hosting. A free version accommodates up to five people, the business version is approximately $8/user/mo., and enterprise pricing is available upon request.
And now we wait.
Last week, Google did its best to refute the US Department of Justice’s case that the company has built a series of monopolies in the markets for ad serving, ad exchanges, and ad networks, and the DOJ made its rebuttal. Closing arguments will be heard Nov. 25, after both parties have presented their amended findings of fact.
Judge Leonie Brinkema moved the hearing along briskly: The first phase, which had been expected to take up to two months, wrapped in just three weeks. The first two weeks were mostly devoted to the DOJ’s presentation of its case that Google engaged in a “systematic campaign to seize control” of the “tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.”
As the trial headed towards its third week, Google called its first witness, Scott Sheffer, the company’s vice president of publisher partnerships,.
As Google Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland recounted in a blog post, Sheffer explained that Google offers publishers tools that the DOJ completely ignored in making its case — such as AdSense, used by more publishers than the Ad Manager product at issue in the trial.
But a reporter for the CheckMyAds campaign group attending the trial described how, on cross-examination, DOJ lawyers stripped back the tangled web of advertising products Google presented, removing those that do not allow publishers to monetize display ad inventory on their websites, leaving only “the products that form the basis of the markets in the DOJ’s complaint.”
Later in the week, Google called economist Paul Milgrom, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on auction theory. According to Mulholland, he testified “every one of the conducts we’ve described — Google’s programs — benefited its own customers, either advertisers or publishers or both,” and said that “Google’s changes to its own auction were improvements at the time in which they occurred relative to what had come before.”
Under the DOJ’s cross-examination, according to the CheckMyAds’ reporter, Milgrom conceded that Google does have an advantage over competitors because of practices such as “Last Look” (in which Google gets a chance to outbid the highest bidder in an ad auction) and Sell-Side Dynamic Revenue Share (in which Google sits on the buy and sell sides of transactions, potentially allowing it to manipulate its margin to win auctions). Milgrom acknowledged he had not analyzed the impact of Last Look on other exchanges or on competition in his research.
Per Bjorke, product management director of Google’s Ad Traffic Quality team, was called to testify about how Google keeps bad actors out of its ad exchanges (so publishers don’t end up paying them for fake traffic, for example).
Judith Chevalier, a professor of finance and economics at Yale University, told the court that using Google tools takes a lower share of publishers’ revenue, and that on average it is “less expensive to use Google-to-Google than using third-party-to-third-party” tools for connecting publishers and advertisers, Mulholland wrote.
CheckMyAds noted that a chart presented by Chevalier showed that Google Ads was the only buying tool that connected with Google Ad Exchange, a fact DOJ noted in its cross-examination. The integration of Google’s different ad technologies and the lack of openness to competitors is one elements of the DOJ’s case.
Mulholland didn’t namecheck any of the witnesses Google called in its last two days of evidence, but CheckMyAds had plenty to say about Mark Israel, an economics expert who, it came out in questioning, has done paid work for Google in the past. He sought to show that the market for online advertising is a single two-sided market and not the three separate markets (ad servers, ad networks, and ad exchanges) the DOJ says it is.
After Google wrapped up its case, this phase of the hearing concluded with the DOJ calling one last witness in a bid to rebut some of Google’s claims. It asked Matthew Wheatland, chief digital officer of British newspaper The Daily Mail, about some of the alternatives to Google that Israel had suggested publishers might use; according to CheckMyAds’ account of the session, Israel’s and Wheatland’s views did not align.
Brinkema sent Google and the DOJ away with about a month to present their amended findings of fact. After closing arguments, she may issue her opinion before the end of the year.
That’s not going to be the end of it, though. If things go the DOJ’s way, a separate hearing will be held to determine appropriate remedies. And with its business model at stake, Google will almost certainly appeal any ruling, or part of the ruling, that goes against it.
It is strategically essential for the US to bring home the manufacture of key components for the technology used across government, consumer, and enterprise markets, an imperative impacting IT leadership that will generate change across the coming decade.
That’s why it matters that Apple’s chip manufacturing partner, TSMC, has inked a deal with Amkor to “collaborate and bring advanced packaging and test capabilities to Arizona, further expanding the region’s semiconductor ecosystem.” Both TSMC and Amkor are investing in major projects in Arizona. Apple is the biggest customer of both firms.
If this news sounds familiar it’s because Apple confirmed its own deal with Amkor to package Apple Silicon at TSMC last November. This made Apple the “first and largest” customer at Amkor’s new manufacturing plant, which at that time was billed as the “largest advanced packaging facility in the US.”
Discussing that arrangement at the time, Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams said: “Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we’ll continue to expand our investment here in the United States.”
He characterized Apple as, “thrilled that Apple Silicon will soon be produced and packaged in Arizona.” Since then, TSMC has begun small-scale production of the A16 chip used in iPhone 15 and 15 Plus.
The most recent announcement from Amkor and TSMC suggests the wind under this plan is blowing a little more strongly. The memorandum of understanding between the two companies means they will work together to bring “advanced packaging and test capabilities” to Arizona.
There is quite a lot more to the agreement:
But what may perhaps be most important is that the companies intend to jointly define some packaging technologies, such as TSMC’s Integrated Fan-Out (InFO) and Chip on Wafer on Substrate (CoWoS).
Apple watchers take note that InFO packaging features have been in chips since the A10 and also in the R1 chip inside Vision Pro. It is also notable that Google is expected to begin using chips with InFO packaging beginning in 2025. With many in tech coalescing around Arm-based processors, it’s hard not to see the strategic importance of bringing manufacturing into the US, particularly around AI.
CoWoS could also hold interesting opportunities for Apple, as it’s an advanced chip packaging tech that can efficiently link graphics processors, memory, and CPU together. There may be some implications as Apple is expected to move to 2nm chips (made by TSMC, designed by Apple’s silicon teams, and based on Arm reference designs) in 2025.
TSMC Chairman and CEO C.C. Wei referenced this a little earlier in the year, telling Nikkei, “AI is so hot that all my customers want to put AI into their devices.” As history shows, Apple has now accomplished precisely that and Nvidia uses CoWoS chip packaging tech in its own high-performance graphics processors.
Speculation aside, this is what Amkor and TSMC had to say in a statement announcing the agreement: “Amkor is proud to collaborate with TSMC to provide seamless integration of silicon manufacturing and packaging processes through an efficient turnkey advanced packaging and test business model in the United States,” said Giel Rutten, Amkor’s president and CEO. “This expanded partnership underscores our commitment to driving innovation and advancing semiconductor technology while ensuring resilient supply chains.”
“Our customers are increasingly depending on advanced packaging technologies for their breakthroughs in advanced mobile applications, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, and TSMC is pleased to work side by side with a trusted longtime strategic partner in Amkor to support them with a more diverse manufacturing footprint,” said Kevin Zhang, TSMC’s senior vice president of business development and global sales and deputy Co-COO.
“We look forward to close collaboration with Amkor at their Peoria facility to maximize the value of our fabs in Phoenix and provide more comprehensive services to our customers in the United States.”
It is almost certainly no coincidence these deals are all falling into place just two years after the US passed the CHIPS and Science Act to fund corporations such as TSMC and Amkor to increase investment in US semiconductor industries.
Apple last year confirmed that Amkor will invest approximately $2 billion in its Arizona project, even as Cupertino confirmed itself to be on target to invest $430 billion in the US economy by 2026. Of course, behind all of this, with the company quietly beginning iPhone manufacturing in Brazil, to what extent will future iPhones be American made?
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