I recently joined a group of IT managers to dig into the issues they face in building their next-generation desktop architectures.

The format of the event was a roundtable discussion on key issues, sponsored by NEC and hosted by Computing. But once we started going round the table doing the introductions, it seemed that everyone was keen to unburden themselves of the pressing issues and trends that they see today, and it’s interesting to see how this small sample mirrors some of the output of Freeform Dynamics’ primary research.

One of the areas that we naturally covered was the migration to Microsoft Vista and the Office 2007 application suite. Opinions in the room matched the research that we carried out on Vista adoption in the first part of 2006, with only one out of the 10 IT managers present doing an active migration, the others preferring to wait some period of time until convinced of the stability of the new products. This latter course was expressed in a number of different ways, from the standard ‘not until Service Pack 2’ statement to a more measured response tied to the product lifecycle of the PCs.

One of the frustrations expressed was the feeling that everyone was being driven by Microsoft’s product release agenda, rather than being involved in a consultative process to take business capability forward on the new platforms. While we all like to be armchair marketing experts, there is an argument that says that Microsoft has been very keen on pushing the new technologies in Vista and Office 2007 and the degree of development effort involved in delivering them, encapsulated in the mass advertising around the campaign ‘The Wow starts now’, as opposed to communicating the undoubted business benefits that can be derived from adopting them. This is particularly true of new line of business applications developed using the latest version of Visual Studio that can access the new display capabilities in Vista, and the integration of products in the Office suite with collaboration services such as SharePoint.

SharePoint has achieved a viral level of success within organisations, much in the way that departmental Lans (local area networks) did in the 1980s, and this was again validated by a straw poll in the room, with some of the participants noting their surprise at how many SharePoint servers they were able to find on their networks when they went and looked. In a lot of cases these servers remained in place after the project they were set up to support had finished, which raises some interesting issues around management and administration.

Clearly SharePoint is delivering business value, but in many cases there is no corporate policy for management and use, so it’s probably a sound idea for IT and business to get together to develop a support and management model for better managed use of the technology. This would then make it easier to develop some of the Office 2007 collaboration features that would otherwise be underutilised. This additional value would also help motivate users to go through the pain barrier as far as learning the use of the new look-and-feel of the suite, such as the ribbon menu system.

Another area that a number of participants commented on was the pressure on IT coming from newer entrants to the workforce who have been accustomed to a rich online experience. It’s often frustrating for these younger people to move into to a computing environment that is missing the kind of collaborative experience that they have been used to. In many cases they understand the difference between work and social life, but they don’t understand why technologies such as online group chat, file sharing and free voice over IP are not available to facilitate their work.

This feeling is further strengthened when the employer claims a commitment to home working, in which case the remote worker is using a home machine on which they are used to using newer social tools. This contrasts with the challenge at the other end of the age and experience spectrum with more mature workers who lack IT confidence, feeling very nervous about setting up and doing self-maintenance on home networking.

There was also some discussion on the whole area of green computing. Much in the news with politicians tripping over themselves to burnish their ecological credentials, IT managers are dealing with more practical issues, like how to get all the heat out of dealing rooms that have three computers and five screens per desk, and getting power in and out of wiring closets that have to be upgraded to support the power over Ethernet (PoE) required to drive the latest generation of IP phones. Having worked for a thin client manufacturer in a former life, it was good to hear that this technology still has good mindshare in the enterprise, with many IT managers considering it for suitable environments such as call centres, hotdesks, and applications where data has to be kept away from local storage. Many of the drawbacks are now overcome, particularly in areas of graphics delivery, with newer techniques such as those from NEC allowing the delivery of streaming video without being hamstrung by the poor performance of the screen display protocol.

The main conclusion, which isn’t exactly a revelation, is that IT managers are clearly ready to embrace newer technologies, but on their own terms. Key criteria include achieving harmony with existing investments in software and systems, as well as timing of the product upgrade cycle. Vista and Office upgrades will be more palatable if they fit this model, as opposed to being force-fed as the only available software option on newer equipment. But the substantial discontinuity that this migration represents is giving some IT managers, particularly those in the public sector with an obligation to get the most utility from the public money they use, to look, however briefly, at alternative desktop technologies such as thin client, and even different software solutions such as Linux, OpenOffice and StarOffice.

David Perry