360 IT Advice: Real Challenges, Expert Solutions

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Microsoft is sponsoring an innovative new site, where top tech sites, along with their experts and readers can partner, and offer advice to your challenging IT questions: 360itadvice.com. What keeps you up at night? Ask for advice.

GeekstToGo.com is participating, along with a group of impressive sites that  you’ve likely read, or even received advice from before: experts-exchange.com, petri.co.il, smallnetbuilder.com, bleepingcomputer.com, howtogeek.com, and usingwindowshomeserver.com.

Here is a sampling of recent questions. Click the links to read the answers, or add your own:

Will Internet Explorer implement established web standards and be faster in adopting such?

I am a web site architect for the European Patent Office, which employs more than 7,000 people. As my day job and also in my spare time, I create and implement web sites and constantly run into issues with IE6, 7 and 8 which are simply not present in Firefox 3.x nor in Safari. Examples are css related (round corners), Image related (png handling), Dom related (Iframes not showing external sites, resize issues, no support to get the browser size). Can you advise me and other Web site developers out there if there will be a more agile release of IE in the future that will implement wishlists from developers?

How to keep systems secured and protected from threats delivered such as drive-by downloads

I work with a very large enterprise company that has a very distributed environment (international with many small remote locations).
In today’s world, the use of the Internet is crucial to day to day business operations. Even with firewalls and anti-virus software, users still get infected with virus’s and malware. Most notable is the drive by downloads and related vectors of infection. The most common example would be the rouge, fake anti-virus programs.
As we look forward to windows 7 in the enterprise along with the enhancements that cloud computing bring to the anti-virus software, is there a better way to sandbox or secure the browser model from drive by downloads and similar vectors of attack?

What’s best route to secure remote access?

Our office has multiple users who want remote access to a database system. Possible complication is that we have multiple IP addresses. We don’t have a full-time IT person, so the system has to be easy to set up and administrate. I also want to control who has access. Finally, I like the router/gateway we have, which doesn’t have VPN endpoint capability. So I don’t want to buy a new router. What’s the best way to do this? If I went with a service like GoToMyPC, can it be centrally administrated? Or should I swallow hard and get a VPN/SSL gateway router?