Asp surfing

Channel surfing on the pay-per-view network

Application Service Providers (ASPs), the most recent Internetbased trend in the computer application software industry, appear to be the inspiration for a newly announced version of the Windows operating system known as Windows.Net. An ASP is a company that offers applications such as general ledger or payroll as a kind of pay-perview Internet service. This allows ASP customers to forgo the costly purchase of servers, database software and application licences in favour of a pay-as-you-go service delivered over the Internet. Using this same business model, Microsoft is developing a version of Windows that would be delivered as an online service and paid for on a usage basis. Windows.Net will be accompanied by a new version of MS Office known as Office.Net, which will be subject to the same usage model. Windows.Net and its associated applications still leverage the power of individual desktop PCs, but once the basic core is installed, all additional services, updates, drivers and applications are delivered over the Internet.

While Windows.Net may sound a little too much like a brush with Big Brother for many consumers, to IT professionals in local government it comes as a cool breeze on sweltering day. Despite their power and flexibility, personal computers have been the bane of the IT manager's existence for the past 10 years. They were tolerable enough in the days of MS-DOS when the entire PC operating system fit on two diskettes and could be installed in five minutes.

The advent of MS Windows, however, has increased the operating system maintenance workload of the IT department 100-fold. Keep in mind that during the early 1980s the IT staff of most local governments was kept busy maintaining the operating system on the corporate mainframe or minicomputer.

The current versions of Windows are just as complex and labour-intensive as the minicomputer operating systems of the 1980s, and now we are coping with hundreds of installations per organization instead of just one.

For most IT staff, installing an operating system the first few times is mildly entertaining. With PC counts running in the hundreds in many local governments, the installations on all but the first few PCs are widely regarded as high-tech scut work. Windows installations and upgrades are often relegated to co-op students who struggle to crank out the installations against mounting deadlines.

After several abortive attempts to simplify the maintenance of hundreds of PCbased operating system installations, Microsoft seems poised to increase the productivity of your IT department by orders of magnitude with the implementation of Windows.Net and Office.Net. Once the core of the operating system is installed, operating system maintenance, including the never-ending stream of patch updates, is implemented automatically with zero labour component. Additional features and applications are subscribed to rather than installed. Users can be updated from one version of software to the next by simply changing setting in their account database entry. Windows. Net is also intended to simplify the installation of peripheral equipment such as printers and scanners. Using the new .Net device software offering, peripheral devices are connected to the Internet rather than to your desktop PC. You likely won't find Windows.Net on the shelves of your local software store. Microsoft is planning to roll it out as an

Internet-based service that would be paid for monthly like your cable television or telephone utilities. Like cable television, Windows.Net users would pay a monthly fee based on the amount of service to which they subscribe. The more features you use, the more you pay. If you use a feature or application only once, you pay for it only that one time and then never again.Depending upon the pricing model, this could represent a cost saving for many local governments.While Outlook and Word are generally used by everyone, every day, applications such as MS Project or Access are generally used on a much less frequent basis, and thus licences to that product have much more idle time. Under the current pricing model, software that's rarely used costs the same as software that's frequently used.

Worse yet, many organizations wind up with a certain amount of "shelfware," or software that seems like a good idea at the time of purchase, but spends most of its life sitting on the shelf.

Small local governments that don't have IT professionals on staff will experience immeasurable benefit from Windows.Net. Potentially, the need to have qualified technical staff on site will be greatly reduced. Local governments that do have IT staff will find they have more time available to deliver business specific value. This means that for a local government with 600 staff members, system administration could go back to being a three-person job like it was in the mainframe days. The rest of the IT staff will have the time to focus on application support and implementation projects. Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE) should take note: Windows.Net could have a significant impact on the demand for your skills. In the mainframe days, application development and support represented the lion's share of IT career opportunities.The advent of PCbased LANs greatly increased the need for infrastructure expertise and thus the employment opportunities and pay levels of those with this knowledge increased accordingly. The typical IT staffer of the '00s has more technical knowledge than those of the '80s, but much less business-specific knowledge. A return to a less labour-intensive computing model may result in significant reduction in demand for the skills of the MCSE. With Windows.Net still several years, out, now is the time to start taking the courses you need to avoid joining the ranks of displaced forestry workers.