Schools advised against Vista Upgrade

By Dave Nixon

According to UK government agency, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA), British schools should not upgrade to Microsoft’s Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite.

They reported that schools should consider employing Vista if implementing a brand new infrastructure, but should not implement it gradually in conjunction with other versions of Windows, or upgrade older PC’s, stating “We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit,”

The organization, who advises British schools and colleges on their IT use, also supports using the file storage international standard ODF (Open Document Format).

With a Vista upgrade cost of £175 million, of which a third of which would go to Microsoft, BECTA said, with the remaining spent on deployment costs, testing and hardware upgrades.

That amount would not be adequate to procure Windows Aero Graphics compatible graphics cards although that is no significant loss as “there was no significant benefit to schools and colleges in running Aero,” it said.

With regards to Office 2007, “there remains no compelling case for deployment,” BECTA said in its full report, published last week.

BECTA was similarly unconvinced about the advantages of Vista and Office 2007 last January, publishing a provisional report based on its evaluation of beta versions of the new software. At that time, it recommended that the added value of Vista’s new features was insufficient in justifying the cost of deployment, while Office 2007 contained no “must-have” features.

Although interoperability is one of Microsoft ‘s claimed benefits for the OOXML (Office Open XML) document format, BECTA warned schools that do opt for Office 2007 to avoid the format due to concerns regarding compatibility between different applications.

BECTA encouraged schools to heighten the awareness of free alternatives to Microsoft’s products to teachers, parents and pupils, asking the IT industry to progress their use.

BECTA also recommended implementing desktops to facilitate open-source applications, and recommend schools to be adamant that their suppliers deliver office productivity software with the ability to open and save ODF documents, setting it as the default file format.

It heavily criticised Microsoft for its tardy integration of ODF support in Office 2007.
BECTA stated “While the product includes the functionality to read virtually every other relevant file format ‘out of the box’, the processes for dealing with ODF files are very cumbersome” .

Additionally, it stated that ODF file converters from Microsoft act differently from the regular file save dialogs and are not intuitive.

BECTA stated “We believe that these arrangements present sufficient technical difficulties for the majority of users to make them disinclined to use competitor products and this may weaken competition,” .