Woolworths is officially dropping its Microsoft software and Windows based hardware in favour for Google’s hardware such as the Chromebox thin clients and Chromebook laptops.
Woolworths Chief Information Officer, Daniel Beecham, said that the company “wants to ensure that the technology it offers at work is equal to or better than what its staff use at home”.
Employees will now stop writing up documents in word and sending emails in Outlook and instead use Google Docs and Google Apps to do the tasks. The Google apps that Mr Beecham has said the company will be using, include: Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Google Talk, Google+, Drive, Youtube and Google Docs to replace Office.
Woolworths will take a cautious approach to the deployment with only an initial 25,000 out of 200,000 staff swapping over.
The move was a result of Woolworth’s assessing its options over four areas, which the landed with Google.
“Simplicity and ease of use of the solution, the support for mobility, activity-based working and bring-your-own-device, security and the overall value proposition,” Mr Beecham said.
He said that Google was the only proposition that was device independent for mobile.
“All I needed was a browser to be able to work. In our experience, that wasn’t the case with the Microsoft solution,” Mr Beecham said.
Woolworths also dumped their Blackberry system last year in favour for iPhones’s that it gave staff.
For such a large company, I find this move a bit odd. Sure, it offers better device independence than Microsoft’s offering, but the service Google offers right now just isn’t up to the standards that Microsoft’s is for the corporate world, especially Office and Lync. As well as that, other features such as Youtube and Google+ can be offered with no need to completely swap systems to an all Google affair.
Via (The Australian)
