To Each His Own ... Laptop

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Opinion

To Each His Own ... Laptop

3/22/2007

By Terry Calhoun

It was only in the last couple of years that the number of laptops shipped annually exceeded the number of desktops. I can still remember the thrilling moment when my boss agreed that it would be a "good thing" if we began moving most of our professional staff from desktops to laptops.

Our office, like many, still has to deal with occasional issues about when it is or is not appropriate to have a laptop open during meetings, but mostly we do have them open. Maybe this epitomizes my geek status, but I get a thrill out of seeing my colleagues sitting around a table during a staff meeting, discussing something projected up on a screen from one person's laptop, and each with their own open laptop in front of them.

It's as though we have all of those creative minds present, working with each other, and in front of us "windows" to just about anything we need to know to continue discussions without ever a hitch for missing data or background information on something.

The question of laptops versus desktops has been making the rounds on the university IT lists as well.

On the Educause CIO list recently, there was a discussion thread about whether or not colleges and universities offer laptops or desktops for faculty, whether they include docking stations, and whether the connectivity used for those laptops is more wired or wireless. As typical of such discussions on that list, several knowledgeable people provided some good information. Let's take a look at that discussion:

On one campus, faculty members are offered a choice. If they choose a laptop, then it's their departmental budget that purchases a docking station. That institution is considering offering the docking stations from the central IT budget in order to induce more members of the faculty to select laptops.

Another campus IT staffer offered up that they were addressing some of the same issues, and the security concerns regarding possible sensitive data on portable machines was an additional issue they were struggling with.

Yet another campus uses the same model with regard to the docking station being out of the departmental budget and notes that they have a three-year refresh cycle for new machines. At this institution, faculty may choose Mac or PC.

Another, fairly small, institution also allows the Mac/PC choice but refreshes every four years and does not provide any laptop peripherals from the central IT budget. It prefers wireless, viewing docking stations as mere ways to handle various cables, and jumpstarted the laptop selection process by providing one, initially, to each department so that faculty could see the utility the person using that one gained.

At a state university, the scenario is pretty much the same as at the institution noted directly above, except that there is no Mac choice. At that same university, vice presidents determine whether employees in their departments get laptops or desktops.