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Indiana Launches Statewide Productivity System
TaylorJo writes "Lt. Governor of Indiana Kathy Davis today unveiled a new technology program designed to give all Hoosiers free access to a full suite of computer software tools. The SimIndiana software permits residents to access their personal files and applications from any computer at any time. The software can be downloaded on the SimIndiana site, but requires Windows, and registration on the site, to use it. The program also provides an email address and remote storage on SimIndiana servers."
Sounds good to me. I can't think of any reason not to trust government contractors with my personal information.
And is offering me a ride in his shiny car.
Ride! Ride! Ride!
Oh, is it called SimIndiana because you can pretend to be a Hoosier?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
SimIndiana is finally out? Cool, where do I get the demo and how do I send in the tornadoes?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Okay, a few more words....
Yes, you need to use Windows, and yes, we can't really trust the government (the next government, or maybe the one after that) with our personal/sensitive data/pr0n, but isn't it a good thing in principle that this is happening?
Tom.
Oh arse
As a matter of fact, I'm one of the legions of programmers that lost their jobs when it was outsourced to Indiana.
I think they said it was Indiana, anyway.
Best Windows Freeware
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I really wish people would make Microsoft keep its own monopoly instead of helping them by making IE only or Windows only stuff. They could've at least given the protocol so that if somebody with a Mac or something else wanted to could make their own.
Really, I thought government was supposed to be generally non-discriminatory. It's like "Congrats! We have a super-duper new highway system. Oh, only Ford motor vehicles can use it."
This is really cool. This is the first attempt that I've seen by any state government to deliver some really useful technology to their citizens. Heck, I'm happy just being able to pay parking tickets online, this SimIndiana has online productivity apps for gosh sakes!
While I'm sure they'll get the usual criticism, I admire and salute their attempt to deliver something truly useful to the good people of Indiana. The only real problem I see with this is reaching the many people who don't have access to the technology needed to use SimIndiana. In the future it may be very useful to provide similar services that can be accessed via cel phone. Afterall, these days everyone and their grandma has a cel phone.
Again, Kudos to Indiana!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This State of Indiana and STI have a three year contract for STI to provide the Services and Software to city residents; however, the State of Indiana has the right to terminate this contract earlier. Therefore, any data, files or other information You store on an STI server may be deleted if the contract between STI and the State of Indiana is terminated or when it expires, if not sooner. STI cannot guarantee that You will be warned before Your data, files, email, content, or other information is deleted. (emphasis mine)
Let me get this straight: after they've got the citizens of Indiana using this system for 3 years, they'll be able to blackmail the state from ever terminating the contract. Wow....
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I have experience with this company and this product and my experience was that they are far from perfect.
They came into my daughter's school about a year ago promising the same thing - free applications, email and file storage. And the software seemed really nice - there is a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, etc.
But there were also major issues with how the software worked (or, in some cases, didn't work). People had problems installing the software, performance problems after it was installed (the sim software ran as a memory-resident application from that point forward, which was a huge problem for older machines), crashes, and no one seemed to know how to uninstall the software once it was on the machine. Emails were not getting through, people had trouble retrieving files they thought they had saved (or perhaps the files were not being saved at all).
After a 6 month pilot project we scrapped the program due to complaints from parents. The group participating in the program were some technically savvy parents, most of whom are capable of dealing with routine issues like file management and email. I wonder what will happen when a whoel state comes online and trys to use this stuff.
M