This last Friday I participated in a feedback session on PowerPoint hosted by a representative from Microsoft and held at the Information School where I was confronted with the distinction whether the University is primarily a business or a consumer customer. You could argue both ways.

During the discussion I was asked to express my opinions on Microsoft in general. I have fairly strong opinions anti-Microsoft and in most cases I don’t think they are un-warranted. I keep my mind open and try to evaluate their solutions as openly as I can. Even so, I’m continually frustrated with their inability to provide straight forward solutions that do what I need without a huge amount of hassle in terms of proprietary offerings, compatability nightmares, and their continual disregard for trends and standards. Instead, they constantly re-invent the wheel and impose stupid barriers to be able to inter-operate with their products.

I brought up the utterly irresponsible incompatibility that SharePoint 2007 has with anything other than IE. The WYSIWYG editor for content blocks doesn’t work at all in non-IE browsers but instead gives you Microsoft-ized HTML to work with — it’s completely absurd. The interface is filthy with UI glitches where boxes shift in size and location all over the page as you try to interact — sometimes I can’t click on links when I hover over them because the clickable area outside of my mouse pointers scope.

I mentioned that my harsh criticisms aren’t unfounded because incompatibilities like this prevent the widely varied audience of the University from using tools like this when they are being used to help people from all around the world collaborate from all age ranges and technical configurations. The users of this software includes so many people on different platforms with different browser preferences that for something like SharePoint to be embraced in the academic environment it has to work everywhere. Not just on Windows but minimally on Mac and Linux, Firefox and Safari.

The Microsoft representative responded that SharePoint is a “business solution” and the University is a “business customer” which somehow means these are not Microsoft’s problems. I disagree.

Also, when I mention employees of the University I’m more specifically speaking in terms of a school-specific environment (there are many schools within one University — business, art, information, etc.) rather than a University-wide environment which can be much more fragmented.

Faculty and Staff are employees of the “business”

Businesses are regulated. In most businesses, employees are provided a controlled computing environment to work in and they have to deal. If the corporate intranet only works on IE7 and the business gives everyone IE7 then all is well (arguable, but follow me here). If the business want everyone to use proprietary Microsoft solutions internally, that’s fine.

In general, these same statements hold true for faculty and staff at Universities because they are provided a specific environment to work in and as long as what the school provides works in the provided environment, there isn’t much of a problem.

The thing that’s different about employees at Universities is that they don’t operate in anywhere near as closed an environment as employees in a corporate environment do. They do research. They interact with students, faculty from other schools all around the world — many of which will not operate in the same prescribed environment that the employees of the university are provided.

Faculty are often heavily involved in outside organizations and projects where their computing needs and work environments can be heavily customized to the point that what the school provides (in terms of computing environment) does not suit them. In these cases the assumptions the school can make about its employees are broken and so they have to adjust what they provide to make sure everyone is accounted for.

Everyone else is a “consumer”

Faculty and staff aren’t the only ones using the tools the school provides. Outside collaborators, distance faculty, and students need to have access to a great deal of the schools resources as well. These people could have all kinds of computing environments. These people are much more like the traditional consumer market because their needs are random and often unexpected. They (or we, in my case) need loving too.

Not everybody can be completely pleased, but given the wide variety of environments and needs the school is obligated to make sure the tools they provide will work in as many configurations possible. People run Windows, Mac, and Linux. People use IE, Firefox, Safari, and many other browsers. At the very least, some configuration on each operating system should work with the provided tools. If not the majority of configurations, at least some configuration should work.

Where do you draw the line?

Of course, not everything the school provides needs to be accessible by everyone but for the things the school decides to encourage the students and others to embrace (Sharepoint for example) they should make sure everyone can use them. This means that people on Mac need to be able to work with the people on Windows and if teachers and/or IT requires/encourages use of specific solutions they need to be sensitive to other peoples configurations and choose wisely between solutions likewise.

The University environment is not as completely uncontrolled as a consumer one, but it does have to account for all types — at least for the tools which it expects everyone to use inside and outside of the organization.

If goals don’t align, it won’t work

For things like collaboration portals which the school has embraced and made available with the assumption that it will work for everybody, the people providing these tools should be sure that the company/group providing the solution they are making available aligns with the needs of the University. If not, then the school should look elsewhere. The person whom I spoke with last Friday about Sharepoint said that it was a “business solution” and that it is designed for environments where that fact can be embraced. If the goals of the technology provider (Microsoft in Sharepoint’s case) are strict and not lenient to the needs of the University then the University should find another solution or wait until the provider (Microsoft) can agree that the University’s needs are different and that the product will reflect those needs.

Universities are weird environments. They are so much like businesses but the needs of their users are much broader requiring them to be compatible with a much greater set of technical configurations and environments.

Microsoft, specifically, has conflicting goals

Microsoft, in many cases, is not designing products for the special University environment. They have made that clear. The reason Microsoft segregates its target environments is to have excuses for building products that don’t necessarily make everyone happy but will work in controlled environments like many businesses do. I’m not stating this is a flawed focus (even though I do in fact partially feel that way) but rather that many of Microsoft’s business solutions are not right at all for Universities. We’d all be better off if everyone was on the same page here. Yes they want to get their infrastructure products deployed at Universities, but if they aren’t going to play nice with everyone, then they need to stay out until they do. University IT deployers need to stand up and not suffice with ill aligned goals when they don’t meet the University’s needs.