Maltese version of Windows XP being tested

A Maltese version of Windows XP has been completed and is being tested, the president of Microsoft International, France, Jean-Philippe Courtois, said yesterday.

"It has happened in cooperation with a number of Maltese entities. It took a bit longer than expected but it is going through testing now and the product will be ready in the next few months," Mr Courtois said when he met the press on the fringes of the Commonwealth Business Forum.

The announcement fitted in with a vision he explained to a plenary session of the forum, on bridging the digital divide and making IT available to as many people as possible.

"English is, of course, the global language of the internet but we found as a company that many feel more comfortable using their own language."

Mr Courtois spoke highly of his company's relationship with Malta and clearly looked forward to further growth although he repeatedly said he did not wish to make announcements too early.

He was last here in June 2004 when a strategic agreement was signed with IT Minister Austin Gatt. The agreement included several aspects on which good progress had been made, he said. Among them was education and he has since has had talks with Education Minister Louis Galea on networking the education sector, linking the schools and colleges and training teachers on the use of technology in education.

Pierre Mallia, business development manager of Microsoft in Malta, said seminars had been held for teachers on the use of technology in day to day teaching and Microsoft was also speaking with the Education Ministry on getting teachers hooked into an international community of teachers and developing the e-learning concept which would also include other stakeholders in the education sector, such as parents.

Mr Courtois welcomed the progress going on in Malta on e-government and e-ID services.

Mr Mallia said this work was leading to the development of a number of applications by the local IT industry on the basis of the partnership with Microsoft, such as, for example e-health and other areas that would be announced in due course.

Mr Courtois said he was impressed with the experiences in Malta with the development of IT in community centres. This was a concept Microsoft was developing in several countries as a way to "enable potential" by reaching out, educating and training different members of society, including, in Malta's case, elderly people and people with disabilities.

Technology, he said, was enabling people to live longer and IT could enable elderly people to remain actively connected with society and able to contribute their expertise, whether through business, NGOs or in other ways. The concept could be developed further and the centres could be connected to each other, even in different countries, and used to help assimilate into society people with specific needs, such as migrants. They could also be used for job placements.

Microsoft has also been helping Malta through the provision of expertise, training, grants and products and Mr Courtois said he has photos in his office of the hundreds who queued for the Microsoft products offered at very cheap prices some months ago.

Mr Mallia said that while Malta did not export Microsoft products, the company had provided the building blocks for Maltese companies the develop their own intellectual property into a number of successful products which were being exported to the UK, North Africa and North America. "We see this as a growing crescendo."

Mr Courtois said an area which needed to be explored more in Malta was connecting business applications.

"We see a fantastic opportunity across the world to automate many business processes for small and medium-sized organisations. In a way, Malta is a perfect place, given the agility and talents of the IT industry, to maybe develop on the dynamics products."

This business, he added, was growing tremendously and there could be possibilities in connecting to the Navisan development centre in Denmark with some local companies helping in development work. This was still a conceptual idea that could be of great benefit not just for Maltese companies but also to replicate software solutions worldwide.

Asked about the development of e-ID facilities in Malta, Mr Courtois said a lot of good work had been done and Microsoft would be happy to take that to more countries if that was what the Maltese authorities decided.