August 26, 1996
Sharing Secrets
By Bob O'Donnell
Put two IS Managers together in a room and you're bound to end up with conversations
about how they're successfully tackling their company's intranet plans, what strategies
they're using for IP addressing, or some other technical issue they find themselves
facing. And more often than not, the information shared between the two is so useful that
they look forward to other opportunities to chat. The problem usually is finding a time
and a place to meet.
Well, that's exactly what the Forums here on InfoWorld Electric are designed to do.
We're offering meeting rooms and topics for conversation so IS managers can get together
and discuss the important issues affecting their jobs whenever they've got the time. Best
of all, we're also offering an audience of peers, not just random Web surfers, which
ensures that the quality of conversation is at a higher level than you're going to find
anywhere else.
Forums have been an essential component of InfoWorld Electric since its beginnings
about nine months ago and, in fact, have become one of the most popular areas of our site.
Each week we host eight to 10 different discussions on a wide range of topics of interest
to IS managers -- everything from OS debates to Help Desk-style PC problem solving -- and
have seen a tremendous amount of participation and involvement from you, the readers. Some
forums, in fact, have generated hundreds of responses in a single week.
Still, we've felt the need to improve, particularly with regard to showing the breadth
of available subjects we have every week. So, thanks to the hard work of Forums Editor
Kristin Kueter and design consultant Ronn Campisi, starting today you'll see a redesigned Forums Overview page that
segments the various forum types into new, logical groupings. The Soap Box section will
include Forums on topical issues we think you'll want to talk about, such as the
"Battle of the Browsers"; The Wire will be the home of the forum for Nick
Petreley's Down to the Wire column as well as his upcoming Over the Wire forum on new
technologies and other cool gadgets; and Gripe Zone will amalgamate Ed Foster's Gripe Line
column forum and his brand new Gripe Vine forum on potential new gripes that he's heard
rumors about.
At the bottom of the page you'll also find Lab Talk, where the folks in InfoWorld Test
Center host technology forums on topics they plan to cover in upcoming product comparisons
as well as discussions on the current product comparison; IS Management, which houses a
number of forums from IS Survival Guide columnist Bob Lewis, including the new Management
Speak, as well as the Advice Line forum, which is tied to Lewis' Electric-only column on
IS management and personnel issues; and Help & Development, where you'll find Bret
Glass's problem-solving Readers Helping Readers forum and Kevin Strehlo's Best of Software
Development forum on software development practices. Finally, we've included a link to an
archive of all the previous forums that have appeared on Electric since we launched last
November. You'll find a wealth of information on a huge variety of subjects hidden
underneath that button, so be sure to check it out.
All of the forum topics are updated on a weekly or biweekly basis, so there are always
new topics to discuss. The forums' hyperlinked software makes it easy to keep track of
what you have and haven't read. Access to specific forums does require filling out our Registration Form, so I hope
you'll take a moment to sign up right away. I think you'll find the lively, enlightening
conversation in Forums to be well worth the few minutes it takes to complete the form.
©
Copyright 1996, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
155 Bovet Road, San Mateo, CA 94402. Further reproduction is prohibited.
