Last Friday I had the occasion to speak with someone from the IT service desk here in the overly-large school district.

My problem had to do with the email system (we are saddled with Outlook) and the fact that it was not finding someone in the global address book who I know should be there.  In the course of the conversation I happened to mention that I was using Outlook 2011 on a Mac, something that should have had no relevance to the matter

I thought the person on the other end of the phone was going to collapse as he anxiously recited the standard IT script about “unsupported technology” and “cannot be responsible” and began trying to extract himself from the conversation.

I wonder how IT is going to handle the shock this fall when students in some of our schools are allowed and encouraged to bring their own devices, some (maybe many) of which will carry the dredded Apple logo and run an OS not named Windows, but all of which will need to connect to our network and work with various elements on it.

Kinda puts a kink in the concept of only supporting a “standard platform”.