With due respect to all the Harry Potter (HP) devotees out there (I think that there are a few of them) I’ve never been  been a big fan.  But I had to smile when I was chatting with a friend who works for a large IT Outsourcer in Manila. They support systems for some of the world’s largest airlines. She told me that not much work was getting done today because everyone was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows – HP7 as she called it.

“Oh” , I said, ”Are they just sitting there with the book open at their desk? Won’t the boss see?”

“Oh no”, my friend said, “everyone has the pirated pdf. They are reading it on their screen.”

“Is this common?” I asked.

“Oh yes, no one buys the books here. I’ve got all seven on pdf.”

I recalled that there were no “eBooks” for HP released so I guess somebody simply scanned or typed the book into their computer and pdf’ed it and shared it with the world. That strikes me as a lot of work but perhaps it was a team effort. Where there is a will there is a way. HP7 is the most popular book in history both on and off line, whether the author allows it or not.

Even if I liked HP I probably wouldn’t enjoy curling up with my laptop to read the thing. But the take away is that the world is obviously changing and people must be very comfortable working their way through the electronic version.

Every year we deploy 100s of new desktops for students, faculty and staff. This year our image contained only MS-Office 2007, microsoft’s lastest verion which is considerably different to 2003 in  layout, functionality and file format. While this decision was made back in February through the EATAC committee, the new software caused such an uproar this week that we needed to reinstall all machines with Office 2003.

Now we don’t install new software for fun but we need to change with the changing times. Students will soon be sending .docx file formats to instructors and we need to be able to support them. I’m an old guy and it only took me a little while to figure out how office, word and powerpoint work in 2007.

That said we could have done a much better job with this change process. Another “F” for communicating change. Excuses abound: I think that our recent data centre move made us overlook this step. We will look at training tools for people to support them with this change. The requirement to move to Windows Vista next year makes me shudder just thinking about it.

Thanks to everyone who helped with damage control on this mini crisis and back to the drawing board.