British schools say no to Vista, Office
Stay away from Vista and Office…for the meantime. So says Becta (the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) in an interim report, part on an ongoing review of Vista/Office’s place in British schools.
The report (20-page downloadable PDF from Becta’s website) is damning as a case against the new versions of Microsoft’s software, at least in an educational setting. A final report is still pending but until it is complete, Becta’s advice to educational institutions is to hold off from deploying the software.
Vista’s non-negotiable hardware requirements come into the picture with this bit from the report:
“Over half of the current infrastructure could
not run Vista even with the Aero graphics
engine turned off (estimate 55%) and
virtually none of the current infrastructure
could run Vista with Aero switched on
(estimate 0%–6%).”
The problem with Vista for large deployments in any field would be the exponentially high cost to upgrade hardware. Providing quality public education is already an expensive endeavour which makes it hard to justify buying new PCs just to run Vista.
Becta commissioned Oakleigh Software to evaluate Office 2007 and their findings can be summed up thus – “we found no
significant benefit in deploying the product
at this time.” Oakleigh also pointed out that most of Office’s new features were more suited to business purposes with far less relevance in the educational sector.This will certainly come as a blow, what with Microsoft’s constant push in the educational field.
Among Oakleigh’s recommendations was for Microsoft to enhance support for the ODF format to help interoperability. What with Microsoft still pushing the OOXML format, that would seem highly unlikely. Expect a press statement from Microsoft soon that will ‘express disappointment at Becta’s stand’, ‘stand firmly behind the benefits of Office and Vista’, ‘reiterate that Microsoft is keenly dedicated to the advancement of education’.
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