Current Aims

We ask the College to implement College-wide policy that:

  1. Ensures students are not coerced into purchasing or using Microsoft products in order to follow their courses. Staff should be discouraged from providing course/research material only in proprietary Microsoft file formats on the College web server.
  2. Discourages the use of Microsoft Office file formats for sharing information over email. This is particularly important for administrative staff, who must be sure that recipients are capable of reliably reading attachments.
  3. Ensures all web services are standards-compliant and fully functional in all major web browsers. The main College webmail service, for example, caters specifically for Internet Explorer. Users of alternative browsers are at higher risk because they are required to quit their browsers to log out properly.
  4. Ensures staff and graduate students receive a wide choice of platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS X and various flavours of GNU/Linux and that directory and authentication services are fully compatible across all platforms.
  5. Discourages the use of Microsoft's TNEF ("winmail.dat") proprietary attachments on emails sent from College computers. TNEF is an attempt by Microsoft to lock users into using Outlook by employing secret binary files to encode formatting and attachments instead of using the MIME open standard.
  6. Encourages the use of free and open source software for services when high quality and reliable alternatives exist. Imperial College should have a good justification for breaking this principle when it is alone in making this decision amongst other top universities.

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