IT Quality
Assurance Tools
Productivity
Applications
SHUNRA SOF TWARE MICROSOF T
Shunra VE Office 2007
WINNER
Flexibility and ease of use are two traits that give any product Good looks will get you only so far. For Microsoft’s Office
a strong lead over the competition, which is why our judges gave 2007, the attractive user interface overhaul that the software
WINNER
Shunra VE, a virtual network environment for predeployment lab maker unveiled for its venerable productivity suite helped the
testing, top honors in the Quality Assurance category. Shunra product sail straight into the winner’s circle in our Productivity
VE’s interface for testing application and network equipment per- Applications category.
formance under a Office 2007’s diligently researched and heavily reworked UI marked
wide variety of net- a parting of ways with the file menu and tool bar structure that had
work impairments marked Office from its first days. In its place, Microsoft’s Office team
mirrors the look left “the Ribbon,” a
and feel of running new, intuitive-by-in a real produc- design interface
tion environment element conceived
throughout the to keep users’ most
development life commonly accessed
cycle. Users gain features close at hand
a comprehensive and to change as
understanding of the impact that the network and applications have office workers shift
on each other’s performance and on remote users’ experiences. As a from task to task.
result, production-related problems can be uncovered and resolved Office 2007
before rollout. marked the larg-
Our judges also noted Shunra VE’s wide range of graphically rich est single release in Microsoft’s history, bringing new functional-reports and drill-down analysis capabilities. These help users isolate ity across the suite’s core applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
and resolve the root causes of network and application problems early Outlook, Access, InfoPath and OneNote). Judges also like the suite’s
and determine whether any modifications to the application, network or focus on collaboration, especially in Outlook, OneNote and Groove,
infrastructure are needed. Users get the information they need to make which together make it much easier for users to share information
informed decisions and ensure service levels to remote users. and documents.
Shunra VE is a high-performance network appliance that functions Our judges appreciated Outlook’s new To-Do Bar, which serves up a
as a bridge or router. We like that it changes the speed at which net- unified display of appointments, tasks and e-mail flagged for follow-up.
work traffic travels across the LAN, exposing data packets to the same
impairments (such as latency, jitter, bandwidth, congestion and packet FINALISTS
loss) to which they would be subjected on the WAN.
CITRIX ONLINE
GoToMyPC
ADOBE SYSTEMS The mobile work force
FINALISTS BORLAND SOFTWARE Acrobat
8 Professional continues to grow, demanding Gauntlet We found Acrobat 8 more power, versatility and
SYMANTEC Borland’s Gauntlet is a Professional much improved security out of productivity
Symantec i3 developer test and defect in the areas of file sharing applications.
Symantec i3 is an end-to-end prevention system that builds and collaboration—particu- Our Excellence Awards
application performance manage- quality checks into existing larly when paired with fellow judges found that Go ToMyPC’s
ment solution that ensures opti- development tasks. Excellence Awards finalist promise to users to “be
mum performance and availability Working well with others, Acrobat Connect. We also productive from anywhere”
of mission-critical applications. Gauntlet teams with existing appreciated the product’s inclu- held up.
Composed of the Inform, Insight software configuration man- sion of interactive form fields Considering the product’s
and Indepth modules, Symantec agement and version-control within Adobe PDF and Microsoft free software service upgrades,
i3 tightly integrates the collection systems to measure and ana- Office files, as well as Acrobat technical support and mainte-and correlation of tuning advice lyze code as it’s checked in, 8’s support for exporting forms nance provisions, and lack of
relevant to the performance of isolating problem code before it into the Adobe PDF package or setup costs, we’ll Go ToMyPC
multitier applications. affects others. a spreadsheet. right now.
