Managed Computing: News

 
2009 Application Upgrades

We recently sent a message about a series of application upgrades planned for Managed Computing PCs this year. The first of these upgrades, Firefox 3, was successfully rolled out on May 29th and the second, Internet Explorer 7, was rolled out on July 24th.

The next upgrade is Adobe Acrobat 8 which will be deployed on September 11.  We encourage you to learn more about Acrobat 8 by viewing the  brief video tutorials at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/tutorials/

Finally, we will start working on our Office 2007 upgrade in Fall, 2009. More details will be provided as the project takes shape.

We will continue to work with our customers to minimize any potential workflow impact from these upgrades.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the IMSS Help Desk (x3500, help@caltech.edu.) 

Office 2007 Training Tutorials

Please click here for short tutorial movies designed to help you get familiar with Office 2007.  This website requires a Caltech network connection.  If you are off-campus, please use VPN or webVPN.

Internet Explorer 7 Training Tutorials

Please click here for short tutorial movies designed to help you get familiar with Internet Explorer 7.  This website requires a Caltech network connection.  If you are off-campus, please use VPN or webVPN.

Updated Managed Computing Desktop & Laptop Hardware Standards

Managed Computing relies on hardware standardization to assure system compatibility and stability.  Every 18 months, Dell releases new enterprise-class PCs in accordance with Intel's Stable Image Platform program.  Effective immediately, our new Managed Computing standard PCs are Dell OptiPlex 760 desktops (replacing the OptiPlex 755) and Dell Latitude E Series laptops (replacing the Latitude D Series).  If you are planning any new/replacement hardware purchases, please contact the IMSS Help Desk.  We will work with you to gather your requirements and generate discounted Dell quotes to meet your needs.

Beyond Windows XP (Vista? Windows 7?)

Some of our customers have inquired about our plans for deploying Vista or Windows 7, which was recently released.  As a reminder, Microsoft will continue to support Windows XP for several more years, so we have time to make good decisions about the next version of Windows we deploy.  While we haven't completed our testing and analysis, here is our current thinking:

In general, Vista doesn't offer our users or IMSS many advantages, but it has the disadvantage of being very resource intensive.  Vista does not run well on PCs that are more than 2 years old (most Managed Computing customers keep their PCs from 3-5 years).  Also, some users find the Vista interface to be confusing.  Our experience with Windows 7 has been better so far -- it feels leaner, faster and Microsoft has worked out some of Vista's more obvious interface issues.  Still, Windows 7 also requires more resources than XP.

In short, we will probably skip Vista altogether and start purchasing new PCs with Windows 7 sometime in 2010.  The biggest challenge with Windows 7 is the fact that it ships with Internet Explorer 8.  IE8 was just released, so it's not supported by any of our application vendors -- we're hoping that changes over the next 6-12 months.  We recently started testing Windows 7 in the Caltech environment.