I went to the Charity Finance Directors' Group's IT Conference last week. I'll write more about the other speakers, but I want to mention Richard Barrington from Sun first. His was an inspiring talk, so much so that at the end I looked down at my hand to see if I had a bottle of Kool-Aid in it, so much was I taken in by it.

Seriously though, he convicingly presented Sun as a company:

• with good environmental credentials - producing low energy products, recycling their own paper and plastic, as well as their own computers: "if it's got a Sun badge we'll take it back"
  
• committed to Open Source
• not forcing users to upgrade and supporting all the old kit
• supporting education with free stuff
  

The Sun Ray thin client looks good. Richard said he could insert his id card into one of them in any Sun office around the world and within 4 seconds he was logged into his account with his documents and applications.

The thin client argument generally is impressive, but I don't know why it hasn't taken off. Certainly I've never heard of people using Sun Rays in any company. I'm sure they've sold a few, but it's not making big mindshare from my perspective.

His pitch to the charities was about "delivering an online Global CVS (Community and Voluntary Sector) Community" by providing shared services. There are things to think on there with the trends in online applications, like CRM. My brain is ticking...