New Products

The editorial duo of Robert Aiello and Leslie Sachs joined forces to pen a new Addison-Wesley title, Configuration Management Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World. The book is a guide to effective configuration management (CM)—that is, establishing and maintaining consistency in the performance of a system, as well as its functional and physical attributes throughout its lifetime. The bulk of the book's content comes from lead author Bob Aiello's 25 years of experience implementing and supporting CM. The result is a practical and actionable guide to best practices that will enable the reader to implement CM effectively in realistic business, engineering and government environments. The thorough coverage outlines six main tenets of CM: source code management, build engineering, environment configuration, change control, release engineering and deployment.

www.informit.com

The goal of the new book FreeSWITCH 1.0.6 by Anthony Minessale, Michael S. Collins and Darren Schreiber is to get you up and running with the FreeSWITCH telephony system quickly and easily. FreeSWITCH is an open-source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, including everything from a soft phone to a PBX to an enterprise-class soft-switch. The authors begin by introducing the architecture and workings of FreeSWITCH before detailing how to plan a telephone system and moving on to the installation, configuration and management of a feature-packed PBX. They also cover maintaining a user directory, XML dial plan and advanced dial plan concepts, call routing, and the powerful Event Socket.

www.packtpub.com

The Germans are bringing their flair for mixing tech and design to American shores in the form of docking stations. The firm Art in the City has launched its Charge 'n' Fruits line of überfunky charging devices on this side of the pond, led by a special limited-edition “Big Apple”, which is covered with 22,000 Swarovski elements. If you are not one of the 50 people lucky enough to get your hands on a Big Apple, you can choose from a number of other fruit-shaped designs, such as an apple, pear, banana or raspberry. Both basic colors and hand-painted designs are available.

www.chargenfruits.com

Linux and schools are natural allies, which is the rationale behind Userful Corporation's new Linux MultiSeat 2010—a complete Linux-based K–12 classroom software solution on a single install DVD. The product is essentially a bundle of Userful's flagship product, Userful Multiplier, which turns one computer into ten, and hundreds of free end-user and education-specific applications. Schools can equip classrooms or computer labs with a single computer while offering users their own monitor, keyboard and mouse. Userful says that Linux MultiSeat 2010 provides superior video performance to Microsoft Windows Multipoint Server and calls it “the lowest cost shared resource computing solution on the market”. The product is based on the Edubuntu distribution.

www.userful.com

Real-life CSI types will want to have paper and pencil (and browser) ready to note details of Skout Forensics' Data Collection Kit, a solution that allows one to acquire electronic data in a forensically sound manner from any standard PC. The kit is targeted at companies, law firms, governmental entities and individuals who need help with internal and external investigations and court-ready reporting of digital evidence, as well as electronic discovery, data recovery, preservation and analysis. The approach involves the enumeration of all attached devices and imaging them separately just as a trained examiner would. Furthermore, the kit integrates all required forensic standards in a manner that can be executed by anyone. It has the ability to collect data from a computer seamlessly, both while powered on and while powered off. Skout Forensics says that its innovative approach to computer forensics provides its customers with faster, less intrusive and more cost-effective and user-friendly electronic evidence collections and analysis than solutions currently on the market.

www.skoutforensics.com