IntraLinks Single Sign-on … IntraLinks announced plans to simplify user login to its secure collaboration service, through the use of single sign on technology from Ping Identity Corporation. “IntraLinks was able to quickly and easily deploy PingFederate thanks to its pre-designed connection templates and automated user provisioning for SaaS applications. IntraLinks holds a patent on the use of single-sign-on technology for accessing online information on a permissioned basis.” More

Apple iPad … Apple unveiled the iPad, a slate style tablet based on the iPhone OS, with a 10 inch screen. Available March-April 2010. More
– Alex at ReadWriteEnterprise says the iPad is well suited to the enterprise (and that high-end mobile workers will embrace it).
– Gil isn’t impressed (“Sure, the iPad looks cool, it looks hip, it looks “Apple.” But the shear lack of features, many of which we all were “expecting” to have on a mobile device, boggles the mind.“)
– Jason’s had one for 10 days, and says it’s the best gadget ever made.
– David offers his thoughts on “Phase 2” of the iPad.
– The Wall Street Journal wants to know if you’ll buy one.

On Project Vulcan … Austin shares some thoughts about the Project Vulcan vision from IBM. “IBM’s big fat announcement for Lotusphere 2010 was its new “blueprint for the future,” dubbed Project Vulcan. Big Blue was rather fuzzy about specific features and functions to expect from Vulcan, but it appears the Lotus blueprint for the future takes generous crib notes from the Google Chocolate Factory. And it doesn’t end there. Project Vulcan is described as combining email, calendars, profiles, instant messaging, and to-do lists.” More

Microsoft in 2010 … Microsoft is up for a bumper year of new product releases. “As the year progresses, look for key upgrades of Office, SharePoint, BizTalk, SQL Server, the various components of Dynamics and a bevy of others. These products all build on the new versions of Windows. More importantly, many of the new releases are designed to interact with each other, hence offering cross-selling opportunities. For example, the release of Office 2010 and the new Outlook interface will enable many of the new features included in Exchange Server 2010. Perhaps no new product in the pipeline offers more ties to other Microsoft new offerings than SharePoint. Whether the subject is a new release of Dynamics, Office, SQL Server, BizTalk or Visual Studio, partners all talk up the respective product’s new SharePoint connectivity features, shared workflows and programming interfaces.” More

Microsoft IW Virtual Machine Beta … Microsoft released an “information worker virtual machine beta”, containing a variety of pre-configured software. “This download contains a two Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Virtual machine contains the following pre-configured software: 1. Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the CONTOSO.COM domain with DNS and WINS 2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services 3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2 4. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition 5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition Beta 2 6. Microsoft Office Web Applications Beta 2 7. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 8. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta 2 9. Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2 10. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 Virtual machine.” More
– Microsoft Download Page

Google Doc Thumbnails … Google added a thumbnail view to the document list in Google Docs. “While the standard “list view” displays the item title and information like sharing state, the thumbnail view displays small previews of your files. We generate thumbnails for all Google Docs types and most common files (photos, PDFs, etc). You can toggle between the two using new buttons on the top right of the toolbar.” More

Novell to SharePoint … Microsoft and Novell announced a forthcoming addition to Novell’s Access Manager identity management system, to support LDAP directory access to SharePoint, enabling single-sign on for users. “Novell Access Manager transforms claims into Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) requests that can be accepted by SharePoint. The service component is also used to map permissions from Access Manager to SharePoint. ADFS 2.0 is Microsoft’s implementation of WS-Federation and SAML 2.0. It is a foundational technology of Microsoft’s Geneva identity management solution. Customers may use any LDAP 3.0-compliant directory with the solution.” More

Other News
– Text replacement on the PC … try Texter (more at Lifehacker).
– Walt reviews Evernote (“All in all, I found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.“).
– Office 2010 is to be released in March 2010, according to Steve Ballmer.