“…Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and don’t see a need to change to Vista. It’s like having a comfortable apartment that you’ve enjoyed coming home to for years, only to get an eviction notice. The thought of moving to a new place — even with the stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and maple cabinets (or is cherry in this year?) — just doesn’t sit right. Maybe it’ll be more modern, but it will also cost more and likely not be as good a fit. And you don’t have any other reason to move.
That’s exactly the conclusion people have come to with Vista. For most of us, there’s really no reason to move to it — yet we don’t have a choice. When that strong desire to stick with XP became obvious in spring 2007, major computer makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard quietly reintroduced new XP-based systems (but just to business customers, so as not to offend Microsoft). Come June 30, however, even that option goes away.” Read the full story and sign the petition at InfoWorld.Com
Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience.
Luckily for IT, many of those same trends are making it easier for tech departments to say yes to the Mac by facilitating IT’s ability to provide enterprise-grade Mac management and support.
“We’re seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs,” notes David Plavin, operations manager for Mac systems engineering at the U.S. IT division of Publicis Groupe, a global advertising conglomerate. There are so many requests that Plavin now supports 2,500 Macs across the U.S. — nearly a quarter of all Publicis’ U.S. PCs.
And Plavin is less of an anomaly than you might think. Buoyed by increased interest in the consumer arena, Macs are cropping up in more and more organizations, in large part because end-users are pushing for them. Read the full article on InfoWorld.Com
CBR is reporting that open source use in the workplace is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. Up 26% since last year, businesses are using 94 different open source tools to get the job done.
“[OpenLogic's] breakdown of licenses for the top 25 packages found that Apache, not the GPL, is the most common license. 62% of the packages use Apache, 27% use some variant of GPL and 4% each use BSD, CPL, Eclipse, MPL and Perl licenses (since packages may be released under two or more licenses, percentages total to more than 100%).” Read the full story on CBROnline.Com found via SlashDot.Org
“The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has published its final report (PDF) on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. The agency is largely sticking with its interim recommendations that schools steer clear of Vista in existing deployments and Office 2007 altogether.”
“…Becta recommends against deploying Vista in current setups, saying that the upside of such upgrades aren’t worth the cost. According to Becta, only 22 percent of school PCs in the UK are capable of running Vista “effectively.” Read the full story on ArTechnica.Com
“Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.”
“We wanted to use Fedora 5 and it went all the way to office of [the Filipino] President and they kept passing it around saying ‘why would they offer something for free, and how would they support and teach it’,” Gonzalez said. “The project dragged on for four to five months to a point where Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper. Microsoft was also providing free training to high school teachers.” Read the full article on ComputerWorld.Com found via SlashDot
“…Wallington, a division chief in the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That’s because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military’s computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.
This past year was a particularly tough one for military cybersecurity. Cyberspies infiltrated a Pentagon computer system in June and stole unknown quantities of e-mail data, according to a September report by the Financial Times. Later in September, industry sources told Forbes.com that major military contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon had also been hacked.” Read the full story on Forbes.Com
“When visitors trooped into Iona College’s Ryan Library in the spring of 2007, they were amazed — and delighted — to see 52 sparkling new iMac computers ready for business. Since that first rollout the systems have seen nonstop usage, and requests for more Macs are springing up all over campus — remarkable, given that Iona had maintained a Windows-based computing environment for more than 20 years. With the availability of Boot Camp on Intel-powered iMac computers running Mac OS X Leopard, faculty, students, and all users have the best of all computing worlds.”
“When we started researching Boot Camp, we realized that we could give our faculty the advantages of Mac-based software while supporting our Windows-based environment all over campus.” Read the full article on Apple.Com
Devil Mountain Software, which earlier in the week claimed Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3, the service pack recently issued to about 15,000 testers.”We were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP SP3 delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS,” said Craig Barth, Devil Mountain’s chief technology officer, in a post to a company blog Friday. Read the rest of this entry »
“Open source products comprise the work of many collaborators — sometimes thousands of them, and often separated by oceans. Each person works on small portions of a project, and anyone is welcome to contribute. The finished product will be available freely for anyone to download and, in most cases, modify.
All very touchy-feely, carey-sharey, but why should you care about open source? You should care because Read the rest of this entry »
It will be one year that Windows Vista has been available to businesses on Nov. 30, yet many companies still are waiting until the release of Vista’s first service pack to upgrade. But with Microsoft planning to release the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7, in late 2009 or 2010, there remains a strong possibility that companies might skip over Vista altogether in favor of the next release of Windows. Read the full article on PCWorld.Com
Now more than a year out of the business gate, Microsoft’s Vista operating system is having trouble making friends in the exact place it needs them the most—the IT department.When asked, rather than express excitement over Vista’s promised better security, networking features and fancy GUI, IT professionals admit trepidation over the looming upgrade and the trouble it will cause.Read the rest of this entry »
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is not measurably faster than the original stock edition, a Florida-based developer of performance testing and network metrics software said Monday.
“Microsoft has hinted that SP1 is faster than Vista RTM,” said Craig Barth, the chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, referring to the release to manufacturing version of the operating system. “But we found pretty much nothing measurable. It surprised me as much as it surprised everyone else, but the numbers are the numbers.” Read the rest of this entry »
AppleInsider.Com has posted an in-depth comparative review of Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. If you’re considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office software you may want to give this a read. Read the review on AppleInsider.Com
AppleInsider.Com has posted an in-depth comparative review of Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers. If you’re considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office software you may want to give this a read. Read the review on AppleInsider.Com
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.
…a spokesman for Becta said the problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licences for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else. Read the full article on BBC News (via Slashdot)
Mac users have been waiting since 2004 for an update to Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite, and especially eagerly since Apple switched to Intel processors. Now that the 2008 release is quickly approaching, it’s time to take a look at what Office 2008 for Mac has in store. The new Office is chock full of interface enhancements following in the footsteps of Office 2007 for Windows, including a new ribbon-like toolbar, lots of snazzy animations, and a much snappier performance. Hit the jump for a look at the visual refresh of the Office for Mac suite. Read the full article and see the screenshots at LifeHacker.Com
Here’s a big number: 20 percent of Microsoft Office’s U.S retail sales are the Mac version, according to NPD. Here’s another: Mac users account for 10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales. Read the full article on Microsoft-Watch.Com
“…In all my years working as a journalist, I’ve never seen any technology company spin information the way Microsoft did today. The press release on OOXML ratification is a blueprint for spinning semantics, and the stringing together of truths and half-truths to seemingly make the outcome of one event something else altogether. Microsoft’s press release and statements contained therein are shocking. The amount of propaganda conveyed by this one press release is reason for Microsoft customers or partners to reflect on their dealings with the company.” Read the full article.
Want a low cost, yet powerful alternative to Micrsoft Office for your new Mac? OpenOSX has released v2.0 of OpenOSX Office, a Mac OS X equivalent of the GNOME Office suite for Linux systems. All of GNOME Office’s applications are bundled together, among them AbiWord, the Gnumeric spreadsheet, and the Gimp image processor. The second edition is native to both Intel and PowerPC (new and old) Macs, but most importantly introduces Gnucash, a financial program that tracks accouns, stocks, incomes and expenses. More info. [via MacNN]
“…Paul Venezia bamboozled me into buying a MacBook Pro back in January, and I’ve been using it semi-daily ever since. And yeah, overall, I’ve been pretty happy. Of course, the only reason I was willing to buy one at all was because Parallels made it so easy to run Windows. But while my initial usage ratio was 85% Parallels, 15% OS X, over the past six months, that’s changed dramatically to 45% Parallels, 55% OS X. Yup, the Orchard does slowly assimilate you.” Read the full article.
Microsoft flagship products feature new user interface elements so innovative that other developers have introduced products to undo the changes. Read more.
Macworld says that iWork ’08’s Numbers changes the spreadsheet paradigm. Mac guy Merlin Mann says Numbers is like the Excel librarian who ditches her horn-rims, opens a button and shakes her hair. We decided to give Numbers a test-drive ourselves to see if it really deserves all the praise. In fact, while Numbers isn’t a revelation, it does for spreadsheets what the iPod did for MP3 players. Read more.
I had wondered if the steep cost of Software Assurance would drive some businesses to adopt Linux or even Mac OS X as alternatives. Vista Enterprise includes crucial networking and security features not available in Vista Home, Premium or Business versions. Additionally, essential Vista deployments are now only available through Software Assurance. Read more.
Software incompatibility, the need for hardware upgrades, and comfort with existing versions of Microsoft Windows are all causing businesses that once planned to roll out Windows Vista as fast as consumers to put off their deployments, according to Forrester Research. According to a report published last week and publicly released on Tuesday, Forrester says “most” of the 45 IT managers it spoke to this spring are waiting for the release of Vista Service Pack 1 early next year before starting to “seriously consider” upgrading to Vista. Read more.
Michael Kaye at SwitchingToMac.Com has posted a review of an inexpensive little utility designed to migrate your PC’s MS-Office content (mail, calenders, contacts, etc.) over to a Mac. Definately something you’ll want to do if your new work machine is a Mac. Read more.
Mac Office announced the immediate availability of MacOffice Professional on Wednesday. MacOffice Professional is a business suite for Mac OS X that is compatible with Microsoft Office, and supports the new file formats used in Office 2007 for Windows. It includes tools for word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, relational database development, equation editing, charting and drawing. It also supports converting PowerPoint-compatible presentations into Flash .SWF files. Read more.
Whether Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a full-fledged Microsoft Office competitor is up for debate. But StarOffice, Sun’s desktop-productivity suite, is definitely a head-to-head Office rival. And StarOffice distributed by Google? There’s no way anyone could claim that isn’t meant to be a direct shot across the Microsoft Office bow. Read more.
Apple Inc.’s release of iWork ‘08 this week is “embarrassing,” an analyst said Friday, not for its maker, but for Apple’s rival, Microsoft Corp. Tuesday, Apple rolled out a refreshed iWork that added a spreadsheet, dubbed Numbers, to the earlier mix of a word processor/page layout Pages and presentation maker Keynote. But it was iWork’s ability to handle the Open XML file format — the new native format for Microsoft’s own Office 2007 application suite — that Michael Gartenberg of JupiterResearch talked about. Read more.
While Apple hopes its revamped iMac desktop line will continue to grow the company’s consumer computer business, it may be indirectly making inroads into the enterprise space. Read more.
The debate over the financial advantages of various OSes first sparked around 15 years ago, when the Gartner Group industry analyst firm came up with the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO). Since then, a number of other theoretical models have also been coined to weigh the business pros and cons of various OSes. Read more.
Here is a snippet from an 17 hour DVD set which you can obtain by contacting the poster. “What we’ve got here is Bill Gates raw, lively, on the hot seat and uncensored like no interview you’ve ever seen before.” Read the rest of this entry »
Fewer businesses are now planning to move to Windows Vista than seven months ago, according to a survey by patch management vendor PatchLink Corp., while more said they will either stick with the Windows they have, or turn to Linux or Mac OS X. In a just-released poll of more than 250 of its clients, PatchLink noted that only 2% said they are already running Vista, while another 9% said they planned to roll out Vista in the next three months. A landslide majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version(s) of Windows. Read more.
…With ITS currently being unable to provide solutions for these issues, and still testing Windows Vista and Office 2007 for yet to be discovered compatibility issues, we have decided to not deploy Vista or Office 2007 at this time and cannot fully support either piece of software via the Help Desk or other Desktop Support services. ITS is encouraging the members of the University to avoid purchasing computers with Vista pre-installed or updating their current systems. Read more.
Acer, the world’s fourth-largest computer manufacturer, has accused Microsoft of making serious mistakes with its new operating system. “The entire industry is disappointed with Windows Vista,” Acer’s president Gianfranco Lanci has told Financial Times Deutschland. Read more.
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CBR is reporting that open source use in the workplace is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. Up 26% since last year, businesses are using 94 different open source tools to get the job done.
“The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has published its 
“Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.”
“…Wallington, a division chief in the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That’s because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military’s computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.
Devil Mountain Software, which earlier in the week claimed Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3, the service pack recently issued to about 15,000 testers.”We were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP SP3 delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS,” said Craig Barth, Devil Mountain’s chief technology officer, in a post to a company blog Friday. 
It will be one year that Windows Vista has been available to businesses on Nov. 30, yet many companies still are waiting until the release of Vista’s first service pack to upgrade. But with Microsoft planning to release the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7, in late 2009 or 2010, there remains a strong possibility that companies might skip over Vista altogether in favor of the next release of Windows. 
Now more than a year out of the business gate, Microsoft’s Vista operating system is having trouble making friends in the exact place it needs them the most—the IT department.
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is not measurably faster than the original stock edition, a Florida-based developer of performance testing and network metrics software said Monday.
AppleInsider.Com has posted an in-depth comparative review of Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. If you’re considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office software you may want to give this a read. 
AppleInsider.Com has posted an in-depth comparative review of Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers. If you’re considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office software you may want to give this a read. Read the review on 
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.
Mac users have been waiting since 2004 for an update to Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite, and especially eagerly since Apple switched to Intel processors. Now that the 2008 release is quickly approaching, it’s time to take a look at what Office 2008 for Mac has in store. The new Office is chock full of interface enhancements following in the footsteps of Office 2007 for Windows, including a new ribbon-like toolbar, lots of snazzy animations, and a much snappier performance. Hit the jump for a look at the visual refresh of the Office for Mac suite. 
Here’s a big number: 20 percent of Microsoft Office’s U.S retail sales are the Mac version, according to NPD. Here’s another: Mac users account for 10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales. 
“…In all my years working as a journalist, I’ve never seen any technology company spin information the way Microsoft did today. The press release on OOXML ratification is a blueprint for spinning semantics, and the stringing together of truths and half-truths to seemingly make the outcome of one event something else altogether. Microsoft’s press release and statements contained therein are shocking. The amount of propaganda conveyed by this one press release is reason for Microsoft customers or partners to reflect on their dealings with the company.” 
Want a low cost, yet powerful alternative to Micrsoft Office for your new Mac? OpenOSX has released v2.0 of OpenOSX Office, a Mac OS X equivalent of the GNOME Office suite for Linux systems. All of GNOME Office’s applications are bundled together, among them AbiWord, the Gnumeric spreadsheet, and the Gimp image processor. The second edition is native to both Intel and PowerPC (new and old) Macs, but most importantly introduces Gnucash, a financial program that tracks accouns, stocks, incomes and expenses. 
“…Paul Venezia bamboozled me into buying a MacBook Pro back in January, and I’ve been using it semi-daily ever since. And yeah, overall, I’ve been pretty happy. Of course, the only reason I was willing to buy one at all was because Parallels made it so easy to run Windows. But while my initial usage ratio was 85% Parallels, 15% OS X, over the past six months, that’s changed dramatically to 45% Parallels, 55% OS X. Yup, the Orchard does slowly assimilate you.” 
I had wondered if the steep cost of Software Assurance would drive some businesses to adopt Linux or even Mac OS X as alternatives. Vista Enterprise includes crucial networking and security features not available in Vista Home, Premium or Business versions. Additionally, essential Vista deployments are now only available through Software Assurance. 
Software incompatibility, the need for hardware upgrades, and comfort with existing versions of Microsoft Windows are all causing businesses that once planned to roll out Windows Vista as fast as consumers to put off their deployments, according to Forrester Research. According to a report published last week and publicly released on Tuesday, Forrester says “most” of the 45 IT managers it spoke to this spring are waiting for the release of Vista Service Pack 1 early next year before starting to “seriously consider” upgrading to Vista. 
Michael Kaye at SwitchingToMac.Com has posted a review of an inexpensive little utility designed to migrate your PC’s MS-Office content (mail, calenders, contacts, etc.) over to a Mac. Definately something you’ll want to do if your new work machine is a Mac. 
Mac Office announced the immediate availability of MacOffice Professional on Wednesday. MacOffice Professional is a business suite for Mac OS X that is compatible with 
Apple Inc.’s release of iWork ‘08 this week is “embarrassing,” an analyst said Friday, not for its maker, but for Apple’s rival, Microsoft Corp. Tuesday, Apple rolled out a refreshed iWork that added a spreadsheet, dubbed Numbers, to the earlier mix of a word processor/page layout Pages and presentation maker Keynote. But it was iWork’s ability to handle the Open XML file format — the new native format for Microsoft’s own Office 2007 application suite — that Michael Gartenberg of JupiterResearch talked about. 
While Apple hopes its revamped iMac desktop line will continue to grow the company’s consumer computer business, it may be indirectly making inroads into the enterprise space. 
The debate over the financial advantages of various OSes first sparked around 15 years ago, when the Gartner Group industry analyst firm came up with the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO). Since then, a number of other theoretical models have also been coined to weigh the business pros and cons of various OSes. 
Fewer businesses are now planning to move to Windows Vista than seven months ago, according to a survey by patch management vendor PatchLink Corp., while more said they will either stick with the Windows they have, or turn to Linux or Mac OS X. In a just-released poll of more than 250 of its clients, PatchLink noted that only 2% said they are already running Vista, while another 9% said they planned to roll out Vista in the next three months. A landslide majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version(s) of Windows. 
…With ITS currently being unable to provide solutions for these issues, and still testing Windows Vista and Office 2007 for yet to be discovered compatibility issues, we have decided to not deploy Vista or Office 2007 at this time and cannot fully support either piece of software via the Help Desk or other Desktop Support services. ITS is encouraging the members of the University to avoid purchasing computers with Vista pre-installed or updating their current systems. 
Acer, the world’s fourth-largest computer manufacturer, has accused Microsoft of making serious mistakes with its new operating system. “The entire industry is disappointed with Windows Vista,” Acer’s president Gianfranco Lanci has told Financial Times Deutschland.