Does that mean those headless muppets at AO or was it OA,,,x EDS lot

are gonna be trying to push out more kit, with mickey mouse procedures.

nice gravey train for those who want ot work for £8/h, which in this climate is almost better than working at your local supermarket, stacking shelves...

oh hang on, there's the tavel deductions of 15p/m after the 1st 150miles or 1 hour...

hmmm second thoughts... no thanks, i'd rather stay on the dole, and play MMORPH's all day :)

mines the one with pockets buldging with virtual gold....

...It's the network infrastructure that needs serious work - anyone who has used any DWP workstation will tell you the same story.

Paris, because even she understands the concept that getting more than 200kByte/sec to the desktop when using roaming profiles might help increase efficiency....

Anon DWP staffer.

....that EDS will retain the desktop contract for DWP - yawn.

....That tax payers will continue to pay for M$ office on every desktop instead of an open source word processor/spreadsheet?

....that....oh I could go on and on, never mind I'll shut up and pay my taxes for incompetent muppets from the civil service to get VFM for the taxpayers.

You poor soul. You probably don't realise just how little MS Office actually costs on this scale with the schemes they have. It'll be a trivial part of the cost.

It's the "fees" for managing/planning/etc that screw it.

Whilst again fat contractors attempt to squander Government squillions on a minimum spec IT, we poor AOs have to put up with 'your mailbox is over it's size limit', countless other nags and freezes due to lack of an efficient framework and minimum spec hardware that can't cope - and all for 0% pay increase.

Well done EDS and the rest, that's where the cash drain is not on overemployment of hard working staff.

the cost of hardware an software is neglible compared to maintenance an support elements. Besides won't the public be the first to shout the government can't read your office 2007 files which the public probably downloaded from a torrent or bought at student prices.

The dwp staffer is right, in this day and age who cares about the desktop. Separating it all out will make it more expensive. I bet it will cost an extra 6 months of testing when you want to run web based app through that desktop.

Why not go back to the mainframe days, is there so much return on investment spending that kind of money for desktop? Do you really want all that flexibility and this introducing inconsistency by making up your own responses etc at the end users? I am not so certain that all this progress has made it faster, more efficient and cheaper.