Interesting developments on the desktop front these days. First Google Chrome turns from browser platform to Operating System, something I guessed would happen nearly a year ago. Chrome differs from Android in that it is designed for computers like netbook users who want to quickly boot to the web, not smart phones where Android will run. From the official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Google rolls out the Chrome OS to us mortals in late 2010.

But as Google strikes at the heart of Microsoft’s business, the Microsoft empire has struck back. Recently Microsoft announced it is releasing a free version of its Office Web product. Competitively, this is interesting on a number of levels:

1) Office Web, unlike the Google Apps Premium product which costs $50 USD per year, will be free to licensed customers like TRU;

2) The portability created by supporting the legacy of Microsoft document types. For as long as I can remember, the MS-Office file types (XLS, DOC, MDB, PPT etc) have been the de facto standard for productivity documents, and;

3) Office Web can be hosted either internally or externally. This will simplify the decision to deploy Office Web now our own data centre, versus having to bet the farm on Cloud versions of the software.

I’ll be interested to see if Office Web has the same document sharing strengths of Google Docs and the level of integration with Active Directory.

Anyone else thinking that Google may be the new Microsoft?

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.