Microsoft's December Patch Tuesday updated delivers 59 fixes, including two zero-days (CVE-2022-44698 and CVE-2022-44710) that require immediate attention on the Windows platform. This is a network focused update (TCP/IP and RDP) that will require significant testing with an emphasis on ODBC connections, Hyper-V systems, Kerberos authentication, and printing (both local and remote).

Microsoft also published an urgent out-of-band update (CVE-2022-37966) to address serious Kerberos authentication issues. (The team at Readiness has provided a helpful infographic that outlines the risks associated with each of these updates.)

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Microsoft's December Patch Tuesday updated delivers 59 fixes, including two zero-days (CVE-2022-44698 and CVE-2022-44710) that require immediate attention on the Windows platform. This is a network focused update (TCP/IP and RDP) that will require significant testing with an emphasis on ODBC connections, Hyper-V systems, Kerberos authentication, and printing (both local and remote).

Microsoft also published an urgent out-of-band update (CVE-2022-37966) to address serious Kerberos authentication issues. (The team at Readiness has provided a helpful infographic that outlines the risks associated with each of these updates.)

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Security and privacy go hand in hand in the connected enterprise. So as we approach the holiday break, there's good news for security-conscious Mac-using enterprises from Jamf: powerful new telemetry tools in Jamf Protect.

We know that enterprise users don’t just have a responsibility to keep things secure, they also need to prove they’re doing so. Beyond that, many regulated industries must maintain ever more complex security event logging and insight to show how hard they’re working to protect their systems.

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It's time to retire the stale old narratives about remote work, hybrid work, and flex work.

Is remote work temporary or here to stay? Are remote workers goofing off or more productive? Is hybrid work a compromise between employees who want remote work and managers who do not?

These questions are obsolete.

Remote and hybrid work, in fact, are here to stay.

So the only remaining question (which isn't asked often enough) is: How do we make remote work perform best — for ourselves and our organizations?

The remote and hybrid work trend is the most disruptive change in how businesses work since the introduction of the personal computer and mobile devices.

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Ah, the holidays. No matter what manner of winter celebration you prefer (I'm a Festivus man myself), late December is a fine time for kickin' back and collecting your thoughts for the coming year.

That means it's also a fine time for contemplating that crazy little computer in your pocket and the steps you can take to make it even more powerful — 'cause guess what? A few minutes of tuning up now will make your life measurably easier throughout all of 2023. Think of it as a gift to yourself — one that keeps on giving and, best of all,  that doesn't cost you a single dime.

In case you missed any of 'em the first go-round or maybe just didn't have the time to try everything out, here are some of my favorite productivity-boosting Android tips from Android Intelligence in 2022.

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Using an Apple Watch as a device to authenticate access to enterprise sites and services using Microsoft Authenticator is a convenience that's about to go away. Microsoft says the feature will stop working after an Authenticator update scheduled for next month.

Microsoft Authenticator makes it easy to sign into Microsoft accounts, supported apps or services using two-step verification. Authenticator also generates one-time use codes, so you needn’t wait for text messages or calls to access your accounts.

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SaaS provider Zoho has launched several new tools for Zoho Desk, the principal application in the company's customer service platform, including so-called blended conversation—a combined human-driven and bot-powered conversational service—as well as several refinements to its user interface to better support customers with accessibility needs.

Over the last few year in the customer service industry, there’s been a drastic shift toward making self-service the baseline, said Prashanth Krishnaswami, head of market strategy at Zoho, adding that although the industry expected to see some changes, the pace at which they took place caught some off guard.

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Microsoft on Thursday said it will begin rolling out the first phase of its European Union data boundary plan from January 1, 2023 that’ll allow customers to store and process their customer data within the EU. The move comes two days after the EU commission said it had officially begun the process of approving the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

Under the first phase of the plan, companies that use Microsoft products and services will be able to store and process their customer data within the EU. Microsoft has included Azure, Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 under the first phase.

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Within a week of ChatGPT’s November 30, 2022, launch, the AI-powered conversation tool was the talk of the (media) town, fascinating early users with its conversational abilities and even creativity. Soon, the enthusiasts exclaimed, we won’t need people to write marketing copy, ads, essays, reports, or pretty much anything other than the most specialized scientific reports. And AI will be able to handle all our customer service calls, appointment-making, and other routine conversations.

Not so fast! My own experiments with the underlying technology suggest we have a ways to go before we get there.

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At Apple, it seems likely 2023 will be all about security, and a new report tells us why: The company may also begin to remove some bricks from the walls around its garden.

A Bloomberg report claims that Apple is looking to open up some of its key private APIs to outside competitors, embrace external payment systems, and possibly permit third-party app stores to sell software to users.

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One in four employees don’t feel secure in their current positions and almost half  of them plan to explore new job options in 2023, according to a new report that indicates  the Great Resignation remains in full swing.

Over the past year, more than 4 million workers have quit their jobs every month, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics

The report, by human resource management software provider Isolved, says the top way employers can improve company culture and retain their workers is by paying their employees market value.

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When we talk about gestures, we tend to focus on the fingie-on-the-screen variety — whether we're talkin' Android gestures and all the possibilities on that front or chewing over the similar set of on-screen gestures Chromebooks have had for a while now.

But there's a whole other category of time-saving swipers sneakin' around in your greatest Googley gizmos. These swipes are relevant to ChromeOS, specifically, and they'll have you flying around your favorite Chromebook in record time — once you remember to actually start using 'em.

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The launch of a major Windows 10 update isn’t the end of a process — it’s really just the beginning. As soon as one of Microsoft’s feature updates (such as Windows 10 version 22H2) is released, the company quickly gets to work on improving it by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.

In this story we summarize what you need to know about each update released to the public for the most recent versions of Windows 10 — versions 22H2, 21H2, 21H1, and 20H2. (Microsoft releases updates for those four versions together.) For each build, we’ve included the date of its initial release and a link to Microsoft’s announcement about it. The most recent updates appear first.

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The European Commission announced Tuesday that is has officially begun the process of approving the EU-US Data Privacy Framework—hammered together to allow the flow of data between the US and the European Union—after concluding that the framework provides privacy safeguards comparable to those of the EU.

After President Biden signed the executive order that implemented rules for the Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework in the US in October, the Commission conducted an assessment into the US legal framework that the bill was based upon. That assessment, released Tuesday, says that the legislation ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies.

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New research from Slack has found a disconnect between bosses and employees regarding work expectations during the Christmas period, with a third of workers stating they plan to be online and available to work during the holiday season, despite the majority of UK employers encouraging their employees to switch off.

The Slack Holiday Season Survey, comprises responses from more than 2,000 UK office workers surveyed by market research firm YouGov on behalf of Slack, also found that 36% of employees who are available for work will check in on Christmas Eve—even though it falls on a Saturday this year. Furthermore, 19% said they plan to check their work messages on Boxing Day, while 10% will do so on Christmas Day.

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Fred Brooks died last month at age 91. Thanks to his best-selling software development management book, The Mythical Man-Month Essays on Software Engineering, he became a programming and management legend.

Over the decades, I've met many tech leaders, but few were as quietly impressive as Brooks. While I saw him several times at events, I only spoke to him once when he was the chairman of the University of North Carolina's computer science department. 

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What makes an organization a great place for technology professionals to work? Top salaries, benefits, and other perks are important, but so are opportunities to learn new skills, a flexible work environment, and a corporate culture that values diversity and teamwork.

Computerworld publisher Foundry surveyed large, midsize, and small organizations to discover the top employers for our 29th annual Best Places to Work in IT report. While in past years the survey has been offered only to US-based companies, this year we welcomed participation by organizations worldwide.

Read this special report to see which companies are the Best Places to Work in IT and what it is that makes them such desirable places to work. To read the report in PDF format, download it below.

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Need to cart the kids to school early in the morning or volunteer for a community program in the late afternoon? At Avanade it’s perfectly acceptable to tend to obligations during the traditional 9-to-5 work schedule, thanks to the Alternative Work Week program, launched in 2022 to promote job flexibility.

As the digital business and IT consultancy emerged from pandemic shutdowns, Avanade leadership recognized a need to change the employee experience with a greater focus on work/life balance and flexibility. With teams scattered around the globe, Avanade’s 135-person IT team was already accustomed to collaborating during off-hours and had built a culture of trust and accountability that extended to people who weren’t actively visible during prime working hours. Now, with the formal Alternative Work Week program well under way, employees can request a schedule that works best for them.

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Whether it’s nurturing positive mental health, promoting diversity, or celebrating a culture that recognizes employees’ success, Genentech is cracking the code on fostering a happy and healthy IT workforce.

As a leader in the biotechnology industry, Genentech is particularly invested in its own employees’ wellness, taking a holistic approach that cuts across career growth; social well-being; and financial, physical, and mental health. What stands out is Genentech’s comprehensive suite of mental health benefits, which includes preventive care and early intervention, talk and text therapy, medication management, 25 free sessions with a mental health counselor each year for employees and their family members, and a variety of mental health workshops and resources.

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When a company’s mission is to advance artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to build human-centered solutions for the U.S. government, you can bet continuous training and upskilling are central to the IT charter.

For MetroStar, a solutions and digital services company catering to the public sector, it’s that emphasis on building creative and innovative technologist communities, coupled with a commitment to employee development, that has helped the 400-plus-person company land the top spot for small companies in Computerworld’s Best Places to Work in IT 2023 rankings.

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The 2023 Best Places to Work in IT honorees have now been announced! Read the full report.

We will be accepting nominations for the 2024 Best Places to Work in IT program in mid to late 2023.

Computerworld conducts an annual survey to identify the best places to work for IT professionals. We invite readers, PR professionals and other interested parties to nominate companies they consider great employers for IT workers. You may nominate your own company. We then ask those nominated companies that meet our basic criteria to participate in our survey.

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Back in April, two days after Elon Musk announced his plan to buy Twitter, Musk had a private phone call with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. One might have expected Musk to ask Nadella for advice on how to turn around the flailing Twitter — after all, Nadella had engineered perhaps the most successful tech turnaround in history.

In 2014 he took the helm of a directionless Microsoft riven by discord and stagnation and whose stock price had dropped by more than half during what is generally called Microsoft’s lost decade. Today, thanks to Nadella’s guidance, Microsoft has the third-biggest market cap in the world and, as a leader in multiple cutting-edge technologies, is well-placed for the future.

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Technology companies this year have been hit with global economic turbulence that is slowing growth and spurring widespread layoffs, even as enterprise IT spending in some areas—such as cloud computing—seems to be holding steady.

According to TrueUp’s tech layoff tracker, there were 1,405 rounds of layoffs at tech companies globally through the first week of December, affecting 219,959 people.

When global economic headwinds started picking up earlier in the year, many technology companies reacted to fears of an incoming recession by putting the brakes on hiring. The bad news is—amid rising interest rates, the ongoing war in Ukraine, high fuel costs, supply chain issues, and a decline in personal PC sales—most of those freezes have since been accompanied by job cuts, as companies look for ways to reduce operating costs.

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Given Apple's big moves this week to roll out new data protection tools for iMessage and allow users to encrypt more of their data in iCloud, it seems obvious that security is going to be a major Apple priority in the year ahead.

The Biden administration’s decision to blacklist the mercenary hackers at NSO Group was a welcome move, but it hasn’t stopped the "surveillance-as-a-service" industry. Instead, it's atomized it, which means we now have more companies offering such "services" than ever before.

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Low-code platform Airtable has announced it would be laying off 254 employees across business development, engineering and other teams, around 20% of its workforce.

In an internal email first seen by the layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi (which is built on Airtable), Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu said the company will be evolving from a “bottoms-up adopted product” to “bringing connected apps to large enterprises.”

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Have I ever mentioned how much I love shortcuts?

All right, maybe I have. (Maybe, erm, somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,942 times, come to think of it.) But oh, it be true. There's just something so impossibly satisfying about knowing you're increasing your efficiency and slicing soul-sucking seconds out of your day.

And on Android, whoo boy, have we got some awesome opportunities for cutting out steps and achieving Mega-Nerd™ levels of efficiency obsession.

Today, as your friendly neighborhood Mega-Nerd™, I want to remind you about an easily overlooked option for adding some extra step-shaving shortcuts directly onto your home screen. These shortcuts are buried deep within some of Android's most productivity-oriented apps. And you'd have to be — well, an efficiency-obsessed Mega-Nerd™ to even realize they're there.

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Google’s Chrome browser has long been plagued by memory system-sucking issues — especially when multiple tabs are open — but the world’s most popular browser today got an upgrade to optimize both device battery power and memory use.

With the latest release of Chrome on desktop, Google will be introducing two new performance settings: Memory Saver and Energy Saver. When they're used, Google said Chrome will consume up to 30% less memory and extend a device’s battery when it’s running low.

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The busy Apple-in-the-enterprise space continues to generate new products and services. Case in point: Kandji, which has enhanced its existing Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform with Declarative Device Management. I caught up with, Weldon Dodd, the company's senior vice president for product strategy, for the details.

Apple says there are nearly 2 billion active Apple devices worldwide, up from 1.5 billion in 2021, many of them deployed across the enterprise, driven by consumer choice, and clearly emerging TCO and ownership advantages.

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Salesforce is offering new Slack and Sales Cloud integration capabilities, designed to help sales teams drive productivity and efficiency while providing cost savings.

The new offerings, announced at the Salesforce World Tour NYC event on Thursday, comprise a productivity bundle that is on offer to customers at a discounted rate until mid-January, and a new native Slack integration with the company's Sales Cloud.

Speaking ahead of the event, Blake Markham, vice president of product management at Slack, said that in these times of economic uncertainty, companies are dealing with hiring freezes, and for sales teams, the customers they're selling to are experiencing similar challenges.

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AI chatbot experts are all talking about — and talking to — a newish research project from artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI. It’s called ChatGPT.

(OpenAI, a San Francisco-based non-profit AI research lab founded in December 2015, is the same organization behind the DALL-E image generation technology.)

Conceptually, ChatGPT can be used like the AI art tools in the sense that minimal text input by the user produces credible synthetic media — paragraphs instead of images. In fact, it can write convincing, often compelling essays, stories and even poems. And, like the AI image creators, you can direct ChatGPT to write prose in specific styles.

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Atlassian Thursday unveiled a slew of new features for Jira Service Management—its IT service management (ITSM) offering—providing support and development teams with new automation capabilities, virtual agent technology and on-the-go incident response.  

Speaking ahead of the company’s annual High-Velocity ITSM event in London on December 8, Jira Service Management  product manager Shihab Hamid said that Atlassian—which has acquired six companies in the last four years to "beef up" its product portfolio—was looking to bridge gaps among devops, IT operations, tech support and business teams.

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Apple today introduced several new security features focused on fending off threats to user data in the cloud, including end-to-end encryption for backups for iCloud users.

Along with end-to-end encryption for iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage and computing platform, the company announced iMessage Contact Key Verification, allowing users to verify they are communicating only with whom they intend.

Apple also announced hardware Security Keys for Apple ID, giving users the choice to require two-factor authentication to sign into their Apple ID account. (Hardware security keys use devices, such as USB thumb drives or near-field communication (NFC) dongles, to enable access to a service or application.)

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Apple's global supply chain management strategy appears to be shifting quickly to reduce its dependence on China for iPhone and MacBook product assembly.

The move is part of a larger trend toward deglobalization, or reducing interdependence between business units distributed throughout the world, according to Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst with financial services firm TF International Securities.

Over the next three to five years, at least the for the US market, from 25% to 30% of global iPhone shipments can be supplied by assembly sites located outside of China to reduce potential impacts from political risks (such as US-China tariffs), Kuo wrote in a tweet last month. Longer term, Kuo said, China will likely be the major assembly point for its own in-country Apple product sales, but not for global product supplies.

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Apple’s iPhone production problems in China add yet another chapter to the collapse of previous supply chain models, ongoing political tension and exposure to disaster; all have underlined the need to diversify across every aspect of manufacturing to become more resilient.

The impact of these challenges on Apple means the company has perhaps lost millions of iPhone sales in the current quarter. That’s a challenge, but Apple is by no means unique in relying on a supply and manufacturing ecosystem that has proved less resilient than we need in these changing times.

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Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscribers get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches, and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they’re available. We’re doing this for you, so you don’t have to.

Following are summaries of the updates to Office 365/Microsoft 365 for Windows, with the latest releases shown first. We’ll add info about new updates as they’re rolled out.

Note: This story covers updates released to regular Office 365/Microsoft 365 for Windows subscribers. If you’re a member of Microsoft’s Office Insider preview program or want to get a sneak peek at upcoming features, see the company’s “Release notes for Office for Windows Desktop (Beta builds)” page.

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If there are two things that should never mix, it’s cybersecurity/privacy compliance and corporate politics. And yet, that's at the heart of a compliance fight between Microsoft and German authorities that might wind up punishing the company's customers. 

The German Datenschutzkonferenz — the regulatory body entrusted to handle Germany’s flavor of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — has publicly declared that “no data protection-compliant use of Microsoft Office 365 was possible.”

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They may be part and parcel of everyday business, but with hundreds of business-oriented laptops to choose from — everything from sleek ultralight tablets to huge portable workstations — picking the right ones to outfit your company’s workforce can make finding a needle in a haystack seem easy. We’re here to help with a buyer’s guide that breaks the options into categories and provides details, price estimates, and pros and cons of each.

Let’s begin with the basics. Business laptops are not meant for gaming, movies, or idle web surfing — unless that’s your business. First and foremost, these systems are serious tools to help people do their jobs. They focus on reliability and durability, with models available for several years to accommodate long enterprise deployments; many vendors promise to stock replacement parts for five years.

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Good news, my fellow Chromebook-carrying citizens: Google's ChromeOS platform is in the midst of getting a great new feature that's all about productivity — and odds are, you can find and enable it on your own favorite Chromebook this very second.

The feature ties into the ChromeOS Virtual Desks system. Remember that thing? It's the setup that snuck into our Chrome-colored lives a few years back. In short, the Virtual Desks option empowers you to spread your work across multiple environments within a single Chromebook computer. So, for instance:

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Rackspace’s hosting for Exchange servers remained offline Tuesday after an outage Friday that the company now ascribes to a ransomware attack.

As we head toward the end of the year, Apple has responded to one of the more frequent requests its App Store developers make in the form of more flexibility when it comes to setting prices. Developers will also gain new flexibility to manage pricing globally and can expect additional tools, which Apple will begin rolling out today and throughout 2023.

The big change Apple made is to give developers 700 additional price points to use when setting prices for their apps. The latest move is the biggest improvement involving price capabilities Apple has made since the launch of the App Store.

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Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has announced he will be stepping down from the company in January. The news comes less than a week after Salesforce’s co-CEO, Bret Taylor, said he would be departing the company at the end of the fiscal quarter.

Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020 for $27 billion, in a deal where Taylor played a key role.

The news was first reported by Business Insider and later confirmed by Slack. In the internal message published by Insider, Butterfield said the two departures were not related, stating: “FWIW: This has nothing to do with Bret's departure. Planning has been in the works for several months! Just weird timing.”

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The UK government is backing proposed legislation that would give workers the right to request flexible working arrangements from day one of their employment.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw millions of workers start working from home as lockdown orders were enforced, most employees continued to have flexibility over how and when they work, with many organizations now practicing a hybrid work model.

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Apple is expected to get about one-third of its future processors from a new semiconductor fabrication facility set to be in production in 2024, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The new $12 billion fabrication plant, being built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in Phoenix, is among more than a half dozen projects by chip makers to re-shore the industry in America.

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Apple’s growing status in enterprise IT expands just a little more with news that cross-platform device management company JumpCloud,now offers its service via Amazon’s AWS marketplace.

While this tidbit is probably of most interest to IT admins running multiple platforms — and certainly to enterprises that use AWS — it should also be seen as important to Apple’s adventures in the enterprise space, and to all the company’s most loyal users as they watch the Mac maker’s return to grace in business IT.

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Biometrics is supposed to be one of the underpinnings of a modern authentication system. But many biometric implementations (whether that be fingerprint scanes or face recognition) can be wildly inaccurate, and the only universally positive thing to say about them is they're better than nothing.

Also — and this may prove critical — the fact that biometrics are falsely seen as being very accurate may be sufficient to dissuade some fraud attempts. 

There are a variety of practical reasons biometrics don't work well in the real world, and a recent post by a cybersecurity specialist at KnowBe4, a security awareness training vendor, adds a new layer of complexity to the biometrics issue.

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