Tim Calder

The University has recently released iTunes on campus, which means that from the convenience of your own home you are able to download audio and video podcasts of lectures, music performances, and short films. The Otago University’s presence on the site puts it alongside some of the world’s finest universities, including Duke, Harvard, Stanford and Yale.

Novell NetStorage has also been made available at the University. This new system allows students to access their documents stored on the University computer network from remote locations anywhere in the world, like their flats.. Advances like this allow students time to be used more effectively as well as the computer resources on the University campus.

For those of you that are not aware the Internet is moving rapidly towards SaaS whereby Google is leading the way with free applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Google Reader to name a very few. These online applications are changing the way people use their computers as there is no reliance on working from a particular computer where instead your information is held online and can be accessed from anywhere. I use several Google applications to manage all my online information as moving between different Google applications is very simple and doesn’t require having to log in and out each time. This also includes using Google Doc’s to open and save attachments like Word, Excel and Powerpoint that are received in Gmail. The next move I plan to make on the internet is to adopt new online accounting software Xero as this would allow me to run, process and analysis my join and individually owned companies from anywhere in the world.