Slowly but surely, many US companies are loosening their viselike grips on IT hiring and looking to add new staffers to bolster business growth in the year ahead.

It’s one of the many dilemmas facing IT and procurement executives today: Managing an increasingly distributed and mobile workforce while keeping costs down and productivity up. Organisations with geographically dispersed operations and locations (branches, small offices, home offices) in particular can struggle to manage all of the technology tools employees need to deliver results. These tools include everything from the data centre to PCs, phones, printers, multi-function devices and industry-specific devices such as POS devices, RFID readers, barcode scanners, and so on. It is not just a technology problem, it is an organisational one as well. CIOs and chief procurement officers must deal with multiple asset libraries, often maintained by multiple parties within the same organisation. Multiple support suppliers, multiple contracts, and multiple points of contact can make for a chaotic environment that creates greater management complexity, higher costs, and varied service quality. CIOs gathered during an exclusive luncheon sponsored by Unisys to discuss these issues and how best to tackle them.

An open letter to those who are distraught over the impending retirement of Windows XP SP2:

Google has started using its next generation plug-in API to embed support for Adobe Acrobat PDFs more deeply into the Chrome browser. The company believes this will benefit security, performance and reliability.

Problems once again wracked Oracle's new My Oracle Support portal this week, with some users reporting difficulties accessing the site.

Marylyn Tesconi, who manages a large office, takes graduate-level courses and volunteers at a local health clinic in San Francisco, has more than enough to do without spending hours on the phone trying to get her home router to work. And she certainly has no patience for techs who yell and supervisors who hang up without solving her problem.