Widgets in the enterprise?

"There's no need to wait for Vista to integrate business functions on the desktop in the short term, especially since we're in no hurry to deploy it on our 2,200 desktops running Windows XP. We have to train the staff, test its security management and check its compatibility with all our applications."

That's what a member of the IT services team at the group of hospitals of Le Havre told us. And yet, the ex-CIO Claude-Henri Tonneau, since January the CIO of the teaching hospital of Annecy, was much more enthusiastic in his presentation about Vista at an evening organized by Microsoft on Nov. 30 for the launch of the enterprise version of the operating system. Has the change of CIO upset the schedule? In any case, the next step for the hospital group is not Vista but Office 2007: It's looking at integrating some business tools in the Word's new ribbons, thanks to the .Net technology included in Windows XP. On the menu (or rather, ribbon) will be a prescription writing helper, and real-time tracking of the results of medical analyses right in the word processor.