Grant Gross, IDG News Service, Juan Carlos Perez

Corporations are starting to embrace technologies used to monitor employee Internet use, with 60 percent expected to watch workers' social media use for security breaches by 2015, according to a new report from Gartner.

Less than 10 percent of companies now monitor their employees' use of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media sites for security breaches, although many companies monitor social media for brand management and marketing purposes, said the report, released Tuesday.

Samsung will launch this week two new Chrome OS-based computers, a laptop and desktop that have been designed to be significantly faster and more versatile than previous models.

Along with the new Samsung machines, Google is announcing enhancements to Chrome OS and Google Apps, including tight integration with Google Drive and the ability to edit Google Docs documents offline.

Microsoft is in the midst of an unprecedented, massive upgrade cycle for its enterprise software products, a refresh wave that represents a major challenge for CIOs and IT managers responsible for charting their companies' technology strategy.

Not only is Microsoft working on a major revamp of its flagship Windows operating system, but significant upgrades are coming to its Office products, the Explorer browser and a range of back-end enterprise products.

CIOs and IT directors tracking the barrage of major upgrades for Windows and Office also need to stay tuned to the refresh cycle for Microsoft's servers and tools, including Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Visual Studio 11.

The 2012 version of Windows Server, the version of Windows that runs on enterprise and data center servers, is "quite possibly the most significant release of Windows Server ever," packing hundreds of new and improved features in areas like virtualization, networking, storage, user experience and scripting, according to Microsoft.

The Executive Branch of the Minnesota state government had its 40,000 end users on a mishmash of e-mail systems when in 2008 its IT group, the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), decided to tackle the problem.

Initially, the OET consolidated the users, from about 70 state agencies and on about 40 disparate e-mail systems, onto a single e-mail platform of on-premise Exchange 2007 servers.

Two U.S. lawmakers have called on the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen its investigation into Google's snooping on Wi-Fi networks in 2010 after recent questions about the company's level of cooperation with federal inquiries.

Representatives Frank Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, and John Barrow, a Georgia Democrat, called on the DOJ to fully investigate Google's actions for potential violations of federal wiretapping laws. In light of a recently released U.S. Federal Communications Commission report on Wi-Fi snooping by Google Street View cars, the DOJ should take a new look at the company's actions, wrote the lawmakers, in a Thursday letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

About 4.5 million Catholic school students will get access to Microsoft's Office 365 cloud e-mail and collaboration suite as part of a 3-year deal the software vendor struck with the Catholic International Education Office (OIEC).

The scope of the agreement could later be expanded to include all 43 million students at 210,000 Catholic schools in 102 countries, Microsoft said on Thursday.

The efforts of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration to streamline and improve the government's IT systems aren't proceeding as quickly as officials have suggested, a federal auditor said Thursday.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has made "solid progress" toward IT reform, but officials there have oversold their progress, said David Powner, director of IT management issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Box will start letting customers test a new set of IT administration controls for its cloud-hosted enterprise collaboration and content management software on Thursday.

The overall goals of the new and revamped features are to improve the product's security, give IT staffers more control over users and data, and simplify administration tasks.

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year, in an effort to embrace a growing trend toward Web surfing on mobile devices.

Obama, in a directive issued Wednesday, also ordered federal agencies to create websites to report on their mobile progress. The websites are due within 90 days.

An Ohio startup company has raised US$200 million to fund gigabit-per-second broadband projects in six university communities across the U.S., the company announced Wednesday.

Gigabit Squared will work with the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project (Gig.U), a coalition of 30 universities focused on improved broadband, to select six communities in which to build the ultra-fast broadband networks, they said. The two organizations will select winning communities between November and the first quarter of 2013, Mark Ansboury, president of Gigabit Squared, said during a press conference.

An often-repeated concern that the U.S. Patriot Act gives the U.S. government unequaled access to personal data stored on cloud services is incorrect, with several other nations enjoying similar access to cloud data, according to a study released Wednesday.

The governments of several other countries, including the U.K., Germany, France, Japan and Canada, have laws in place allowing them to obtain personal data stored on cloud computing services, said the study, by Hogan Lovells, an international law firm that focuses on government regulations and other topics.