OA within the Prism

Having spent some time now polishing the OA CD into (what I think is) quite a nice self contained unit for all members of staff to peer into the world of OA IT strategy and come out with the tools they need, my thoughts have begun to turn to the other uses of such container applications.

The CD (well, it's a DVD now, but that's a largely semantic worry) is great for delivering a whole heap of data to people with limited network connectivity. On the CD, for example, we will provide OpenOffice installations in both English and French for both Windows and Mac users, we could cater for Linux users too, but they've probably already been sold on the idea of free software. The point is that the bandwidth afforded by the OA CD is immense and cheap, although the latency could be better...

I think these container things are pretty awesome, and think that they could possibly deal with some of the other IT support problems we're having. The simplest of Web apps, for example, seem to be causing the occasional headaches; email and timesheets, there are people that can't connect the idea of these things with the idea of a web browser - the two are forever separated. There are people that can't quite grasp the idea of tabbed browsing and so navigate away from their email and resent having to keep going back to it. These are hugely intelligent people, but something doesn't click when it comes to computing. Luckily there's always us at _ITSupport, and some folks at Mozilla.

From the blogs of the Mozilla lab comes Prism:

OA web apps as app apps on your desktop. It's really clever - a Firefox 3 based container for running websites in a little window. Ok, so that might not sound too technically amazing, but it's a shrewd move by Mozilla, pushing Firefox as a cross-platform application environment. Some people may want to stick with IE, maybe they love malware, or with Opera because they think that rendering a page 0.00001 millisecond faster will eliminate their browsing bottlenecks; but now that's cool, because they can have their apps provided by Firefox in it's own little window with a link from their start bar:

My icons could have been beautified, but it makes no difference; they're there at least. The important thing is that it's a nice little contained environment, just like the OA CD, but with less bandwidth and more readily updated content.

Thoughts?