Computing policy

[Mighty Firebreather]

Does your organization have a "computing policy"? What I mean by
that is, a policy that prescribes either what hardware and software your
organization will use, or how the decision on what to purchase and use will
be made.

My department is considering adopting such a policy and we'd like
to know what experience others have had.

What we hope to accomplish:
With N users having N+X different machines, and M different operating
systems, word processing packages, spreadsheets, technical graphics
packages, symbolic mathmatics packages, etc. support is much more difficult
than it needs to be.

By specifying one or a very limited number of different machines,
we hope to make maintenance and the stocking of spares more manageable.

By specifying one word processing package, one spreadsheet, etc.
we hope to facilitate the interchange of data among users and minimize the
costs of training and technical support.

I'd appreciate any comments you would care to share with me. I do
read this list but I'd suggest that you reply by mail since the subject is
not really on topic.

TIA

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* *
* Here, there be dragons! *
* dra...@nscvax.princeton.edu *
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* Richard B. Gilbert *
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