KEY POINTS:
Will your workplace be the same next year? Or will some of the long-promised improvements in technology finally help ease the burden of your daily toil?
If your office desktop is Windows-based you may get a new operating system before the year is out, and probably a new version of Office and Exchange as well.
Microsoft's Vista has shipped to some business users and will be available retail in late January.
"Vista changes everything," says Hewlett Packard small and medium business manager Warwick Grey, who was demonstrating the new operating system last week. "What's good about it is never the things they promote. What I see in it is power and productivity. Things such as the way new features in Outlook will make time management easier. It's easier to edit charts in PowerPoint, or move data between applications," he says.
The downside is like any new Microsoft operating system, Vista will work best on the latest machines with the newest video cards and lots of memory. While Microsoft expects it to be its fastest-selling operating system, that could mean a barely double digit uptake over the next year. Research firm Gartner predicts it could be running on less than 10 per cent of the installed base by the end of next year.
Microsoft will be hoping to avoid the battering the hackers dished out to Windows XP when it arrived five years ago, and there are a lot of security fixes and enhancements happening under the hood. Expect even more annoying pop up windows asking if you really want to go to that site or accept that message.
There is also an enhanced search feature, which Microsoft intends will make third party enhancements such as Google desktop search redundant.
If you are a Mac user, you will realise that Microsoft is just trying to catch up with the Spotlight search function in OS X. (It's also playing catch up on iTunes and iPhoto.)
Anne Taylor, Microsoft New Zealand's office systems marketing manager, says the search function will be extremely powerful, especially as people now spend, on average, more than an hour a day looking for things on their computers.
"It's a way to manage information overload," she says.
Taylor also expects an increase in mobility and collaboration applications, simplifying the way people can work together, especially in multinationals such as Microsoft.
"We have tools in software that allow instant messaging systems, so if I need to talk to someone in Seattle or Redmond, I can go in to the system, see if they are online, and have conversations by instant messaging," Taylor says.
"That increases the speed we are able to make decisions."
She says document management software and portals are taking off, which allow users to track changes in documents and prevent people working on multiple instances of the same document.
"Organisations have been trying to get one version of truth, so when you collaborate on a document, you don't want a lot of different versions floating around," she says.
Taylor says the technology is also there to put permissions in documents like email, so they can only be read by the intended recipient, and can't be forwarded, extracted or printed out. Too late for Don Brash though.
She also expects convergence of messaging to increase, helped by the new Exchange Server.
That can be set up so that voice messages left on the extension in the office can be turned into email and collected on a mobile.
"That is huge and the whole integration of the telephony piece, the convergence will be amazing.
"It means I can work how I want to. If I want to go and pick the kids up from school, I am still available to people."
HP's Grey is also seeing internet telephony finally taking off.
"At the roadshow, more than half the attendees said they use Skype, which indicates VOIP (voice over internet protocol) is becoming ubiquitous," Grey says.
Mobility continues to be a trend, with notebooks coming out broadband enabled, and no longer needing a separate card.
Now all it needs is for mobile data charges to come within reach of reason for mobile computing to take off.
"We are also seeing more interest in small handheld devices, such as Navman-enable Ipacs," Grey says.
"In the printer space there is a shift to multifunction devices, with more printing of colour in the office.
"Medium-sized businesses are moving to managed print services, so they are paying a per-page cost rather than consumables."
Grey says new dual core chips are giving the next generation of PCs and laptops 40 per cent more processing power with less heat.
Don't write off Apple. Over the past year it increased its share of the overall computing market by 32 per cent to 5.4 per cent., helped by the switch to Intel chips. Its target is 10 per cent by mid 2008.
What we're not hearing much about is Linux in the New Zealand market. While it has its adherents, the Microsoft-centric nature of the industry here and the way support firms work means most workers will still be seeing the XP logos when they log in for some time to come.
