Last week, over 30 CGIAR staff from CIAT, ICARDA, IFPRI, IRRI, IWMI and the WorldFish Center based in locations all over the world were given the opportunity to learn about  the much talked-about online reference management application, Mendeley in a webinar conducted by Mendeley Director, Jan Reichelt, with input from IFPRI user experiences.

Just before the new year holidays, I posted a blog on online reference management tools, specifically Mendeley, which has been growing in popularity within the scientific community. If you want to organize your references; annotate PDF research papers as is and share them with colleagues and others , Mendeley might be a good place to start.
In essence, there are two levels when it comes to using Mendeley:

Did you know that simply by the fact of having our office or home computers connected to a network and on the Internet; these are exposed to several computer security risks?
A computer security risk arises from the intentional or unintentional misuse of computers, network resources as well as the internet. These risks may result in the loss of or damage to computer hardware, software, confidential information, and data integrity as well as network and internet availability.
One of the main tasks of the CGIAR Information Technology managers is to ensure that computers and information in centers are as secure as possible, although as you may already know, nothing is 100% secure…

The question is no longer whether a bear can dance, but how well the bear dances. This is the bottom line message to Cloud Computing and Software as a Service, one of the top technologies we expect see widely used in the CGIAR in 2010.
The point is: “corporate” IT providers can no longer ignore the fact that Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service are here, and are here to stay.They provide a solid, usable, reliable, affordable alternative to self-hosted costly infrastructure. The important thing is choosing the right provider. But that’s just part of doing business well.