Michael Webb's Blog

Office 2008 for Mac

I've just spent a short while looking at Office 2008 for Mac, and my first impressions can be summed up as follows:

• It doesn't share the same interface as Office 2007 for Windows.
• It runs a lot faster then Office 2004 on Intel Macs
• It reads Office 2007 for Windows files.

I know that's brief, but that's all most people will want to know. The applications have all received minor updates, but nothing jumps out immediately. However I really was expecting it to look a lot more like Office 2007 for Windows (which I really like).

I've put a screen shot of Word (below) for comparison (first Windows, then Mac). As you can see, there really isn't that much in common - in particular the Mac version doesn't have the same tabbed menu system.  If you only use or support one platform this probably isn't a major issue, but given we support both its far from ideal.

Still, the speed improvements and Office 2007 compatibility will make it a must have upgrade for most people (us included).

There is a good full review here:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3215

Dell XPS One

Last time we evaluated all-in-one PCs I was singularly unimpressed with all the systems we looked at, and we ended up going with iMacs running Windows. 

Dell's newest attempt at an all-in-one may be better - the XPS One.

It's a lot more expensive than an iMac at £999, and is really aimed at the home market, but  from the pictures and spec it at least looks like a reasonable attempt, so we'll try and get one to evaluate.

Anyone seen one, or any other decent all-in-ones?

(In case you are wondering why all-in-ones, there are times when either space is limited, or it just works better aesthetically)

UCISA Management Conference 2008 Day 3

A great start to the final day of the conference with a talk on the Role of IT in the Consumer Market from Nick Jones from Gartner. I 'll admit I was fearing a two-by-two grid-fest, but we actually got an engaging and thought provoking talk on the current and potential future impact of consumer IT over the next ten years or so.

I won’t attempt to cover the whole presentation – Neil made loads of great points, and they are covered in the slides – well worth looking through:

http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/2008/conference/programme.aspx#fri

I’ll pick out a couple of bits that really stuck in my mind:

Technology innovations are now increasing being driven from the consumer marker rather business, and we need to understand this if are going to provide services that are relevant and that users want to use.

I was particularly interested in the section on why consumers choose technology (see Don Norman – Emotional Design)– which can broken down as:

• Visceral (ie first few seconds – Wow factor)
• Functional – does it do it's job
• Reflective – does it match our goals and values.

Visceral and reflective are the one that matter for consumers, whereas on the IT side we tend to focus on the functional.  If we ignore this we are in danger of choosing/implementing systems nobody actually wants to use! In addition, users are far more likely to find a system they like easier to use (as well, obviously as visa-versa).

Nick also made the point that people aren’t rational about IT, and use ‘reason’ to justify emotional decisions. I’m going to do exactly that now and apply the emotional design theory to some instinctive decisions I’ve made:

• It makes perfect sense to actively support Macs  (some colleagues in other institutions strongly disagree on cost/functionality grounds). But Apple products tend to have one of the biggest visceral/reflective impacts – if they make people happy they’ll be more productive/need less support.
• That laptop I saw last week (won’t name supplier) really was too ugly to let our users use! It wouldn’t reflect anyone’s values! They’d rightly rebel!
• Google and Microsoft (see yesterday’s posting) showed similar web based applications suites – I instinctively thought users would prefer one product to the other, and it was nothing to do with the functionality. You can probably guess which I thought they’d go for…

Another important point from Neil - we need to manage the impact of consumer IT, and to do that we need understand it, we need to get involved, understand the zeitgeist, work with people with understand the social issues, but not neccesarily embrace every piece of consumer technology that comes along.

As I said at the start, great presentation – check out the slides.

The conference finished with a ‘motivational’ talk from Adrian Webster. He was brilliant! Funny, engaging, hyper-energetic, with a serious point to make.  I won’t do him any justice by trying to paraphrase him, but if you get a chance to see him do! His website is here:

http://www.adrianwebster.com/

His ‘chips under the helmet’ story (you had to be there – sorry!) will stick in my mind for a long time!

UCISA Management Conference 2008 Day 2

It's the second day of the UCISA management conference – and lack of battery life in my Asus eee PC is starting to cause problems, so this posting may be a little vague! I'd hoped it wouldn't be a problem and that I'd be able to 'borrow' some electricity, but hasn't been possible so far!

Anyway, morning themes were about Web 2.0/Social networking, starting with Brian Kelly from UKOLN and Andy Powell from EduServ – talking about IT Services 2.0. Brian wasn't actually their though, and instead had pre-recorded his presentation. I find this pretty fascinating – I've had loads of discussions with people about why we don't do this more often (we do actually do this for our IT induction), but it's the first time I've experienced it as an audience member. So did it work? Somewhat against my expectations (Brian is a very engaging presenter in person) it worked fine (even with the low production values and a phone ringing half way through!).

What about the content? Essentially the premise was that IT Services have evolved before, and can do so again, into IT Services 2.0 where we embrace, support, and educate users about the possibilities of externally hosted Web 20 services. You can watch the full presentation yourself here:

http://www.zentation.com/viewer/index.php?passcode=MtEzMysauv

Brian's vodpres was followed up by Andy Powell, who challenged the concept of the digital native - something I wholehearted agree with! Andy pointed out that he too had grown up with technology, and actually his wealth of experience met that he could see opportunities that younger people didn't (ie he uses Twitter – his kids don't – prompting me to add Andy to my twitter list during the presentation – how Web 2.0!!)

That moves us nicely to the second speaker – Andrew Charlesworth, Computing and Law Lecturer from th University of Bristol, who went through the range of legal risks we'd need to consider if using external web 2.0 services. Points made include:

• Staff and students don't think through risk – they are more interested in the Wow factor

• Staff and students don't read privacy policies

• People don't generally understand copyright law

• Staff understand the legal risks, and have plans to deal with them

• We need a basic legal knowledge (ie what legal issues may arise, do we have a process for that? Do we need expert advice?)

• Have we done our risk analysis? will it always be free, will it be around in the future. do we have any control over t&c?

• would it be fair to oblige students to sign up to Facebook to take part in a course

• Who owns the data on social networking sites

• Data may be held overseas – what are the legal implications?

• How easy is it to take data off?

• What about performance and reliability?

So where does that leave us? The common theme between Brian and Andrew's talks were they were both saying we need to understand risks. Some of the risks, in my opinion (and, I think, Brian's) aren't that great – service reliability for example – how often is Google or Facebook down? Privacy of data across national borders though is a really challenging issue, and perhaps one of the most obvious stumbling blocks to wholeheartedly embracing some externally hosted technologies on an institutional level.

There's another significant issue though – we don't really have any control of this do we? Our work and home life and identities are becoming increasingly blurred – we can't ban people from using Facebook to support learning. So how much user education are we actually responsible for, both from a moral and legal perspective? It's something we all need to give more thought to.

These sessions were followed up by light hearted debate about whether we should ban Facebook from our campuses. Don't take this out of context – nobody was seriously proposing it! It's not so far fetched thought, I can remember when it was common practice to ban email at certain times or in certain rooms. Battery went during this session, so excuse the lack of notes...

After that – two supplier presentations – one from Google, and one from Microsoft, both promoting their free, web based email/productivity/web 2.0 suites. USP for both seemed to be huge storage for students – 5 or 6GB compared to the few hundred Mb we currently provide. These presentations were actually pretty fascinating coming after the first two presentations, as they pretty much put of all of the concerns, benefits, issues etc into a real-life context. On the face of it they are both very compelling propositions – little cost for the University, great services to the students, a real example of not reinventing the wheel.

So where's the catch? Well...first of all, this was a great real life example of the sorts of legal issues that Andrew was talking about. The University would be taking a contract out with Google/Microsoft, so clearly have some sort of liability and need to think things through very carefully. The data would no longer be held in the UK, so this presents all sort of legal issues. I'm not going to event attempt to convey them here (I'm paranoid after Andrew's talk!)

Second issue, and I need to reflect on this a little more, is that doesn't this go against the IT Services 2.0 philosophy? We'd still be imposing a single tool set on our students (albeit an outsourced one) rather than educating our users to pick the best tools for any given activity. Maybe that's an impractical aim - remember back to Sir Alan Langlands plea to keep things simple for academics? Don't know – my instinct is that this sort of approach is still a very IT Services 1.0 things. Sure, Google Apps (say) may be a great tool set for a certain group of users for a given activity, but maybe another group or activity would work better with Elgg or WetPaint? I think this gets right to the heart of the IT Services 2.0 dilemma – how much technical diversity can our user base sustain? Or am I missing the point?

There are still a couple of presentations left to go, but I'll post this now while I've still got access to WiFi and power...

UCISA Management Conference 2008

It's UCISA Management Conference (theme – is IT Good For Us?) again, this time from a windy, rainy Glasgow. I've got my ASUS EEE PC with me rather than a full laptop, and I'm really enjoying it's lack of weight! Battery life is a bit of a problem compared to my Apple iBook though. I can usually get the iBook to last a day if I'm really careful with the power setting, and switch off the wireless when I'm not using it. I can't get more than about 3 hours from the Asus, which drops to about 1.5 with WiFi. Not that I'd be using WiFi in the hotel at £15 a day!

Anyway, the conference kicked of with a welcome from Sir Alan Lanlands, VC of University of Dundee. A couple of the comments Alan made stuck in my mind – he is skeptical about using Facebook et al for formal learning – learning should be in University's formal environment – interesting because I think it's the first time I've heard someone come out against non-Uni hosted Web 2.0 to support education. Also, he made a plea for simplicity – asking us to understand the technical limitation and time constraints for academic staff.

Next we had the highly entertaining Jef Staes talking about 21^st, Century Futures. His presentation was highly visual, so will loose a lot in translation. Jef had two big ideas to convey – 2D and 3D services and Red Monkeys® (yes – all references to Red Monkeys really did have an ®...). The 2D/3D thing was really a metaphor for where we are (linear, slow, unimaginative, moving a single direction) and where we should be (innovative, looking in lots of directions etc). 3D is about a passion to achieve future this isn't defined – 3d world. Why do projects fail? 2D project management? Too slow?

Red Monkeys® were (I think!) a metaphor for people with passion and ideas who want to change things. Red Monkeys would stand out in a rain forest and get killed by Monkey hunters... Therefore we need Red Monkey politics... We have creators, pioneers, followers , settlers, and they all a part to play if we want to move things forward – creators need to work with pioneers – if they try to work directly with followers things would fail.

I guess I haven't explained this too well, but luckily Jef's book is coming out in English in May, so would be well worth getting.

Richard Barrington from Sun talked about environmental issues. I missed the start, but I've been to a couple of other Sun green IT talks recently. Sun seemed to have picked up big time on the environmental bandwagon. I guess they may be sincere,

Finally, Geraint Price talked about Identity management – really about authentication techniques rather than managing users identities across multiple systems. Main thrust was that high assurance id management doesn't really scale, and that biometrics probably aren't the solution at the moment (not advanced enough, so too easy to fool).

Oh yes, and I'm writing this offline in the evening. Everyone else is out having a great time at Kelvingrove Museum, but I've got a sore throat and have lost my voice, so I'm stuck in my hotel room recuperating... (cue violins...)

University Sector Vista Plans

There is a UCISA mailing list that includes most of the IT directors in the Universities in the UK, and it is often used to carry out mini-surveys to gauge what people's plans or policies are across the sector (I've got one going at the moment about maximum email messages size).

Recently one member asked about plans for Vista, and the responses, from 50 institutions, make interesting reading:

Staff

Staying with an earlier version of Windows - 43
Moving to Vista - 6
Thinking of moving to Vista - 1
Already moved to Vista - 0
Other - 0

Students

Staying with an earlier version of Windows - 41
Moving to Vista - 4
Thinking of moving to Vista - 2
Already moved to Vista - 0
Other - 3

We fit into the 'Thinking of moving' category - ie currently planning to start staff later this year, and upgrade student PCs next summer.  I'm surprised the numbers who have solid Vista plans are quite so low though, although I can understand the reasons (lack of any real business benefit, ongoing application and driver issues, performance, stability of XP).