Saturday, July 23, 2011

Chromebook Thoughts

Top 10 reasons Chromebook will forever change corporate laptop use

I am working with my children's charter school IT committee. We were given a task to purchase 75 laptops for online testing purposes which are becoming more and more required. The problem, as I see it, is that the school doesn't have the infrastructure to double the number of workstations they currently have and handle 75 more laptops that are probably going to be used infrequently at best and possibly only once a year at testing time.

That's where Chromebooks start really tickling my spider senses :) I was lucky enough to receive a CR-48 hardware beta device and so far I love it for what it can do. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it for work because of the lack of critical applications. Just a note, I would include webstore apps as replacements for our regular apps. However, at work we deal with unique software solutions for healthcare that won't likely have a webstore presence for many years, if ever.

This school problem seems like the ideal candidate for Chromebooks. I'm just waiting to see if we can use the Chrome browser to take the tests or if we need to use a Citrix published application. Apparently Citrix is close to releasing a Chromebook/ HTML5 compatible Receiver application.