Sounds like you are handling it well, and similar to us.

Having a company standard that serves as the default, but allowing people to choose something different if they know about these things and prefer something else, is a good way to handle that issue. Macs are our standard issue now for computers, for example, but we recently had someone hand in their Mac for a Windows computer. If that’s how they will work best, they won’t receive any objections from me.

Also, striving to make the company default something that is current and oriented towards what will serve the employees best (rather than make life easier for IT, at least as a first priority) will make sure people are equipped with the tools that make them the most effective. And so it can be useful to be able to say to people: “You are free to use what you want; if you want some guidance, you can know that we recommend using Firefox for your browser, and you can get it here” or “well, we recommend Internet Explorer, and go ahead and keep updating it every time a new version is available–and let us know if you need help.”

We’ve run into something surprising, though, as we’ve tried to take steps to “loose the chains of corporate computer control.” Instead of being celebrated by our employees as the Slate article would indicate, we found in many case it has had the opposite effect and almost hindered creativity due to the lack of boundaries.

There are so many employees who don’t care what web browser they use that when you leave it up to them they look at you like you have two heads. We’ve completely opened up the list of mobile phones that we will connect to our corporate email server and that decision has been met with confusion and requests like, “please just tell me what to buy.”

I still think it is the right approach, but we’ve found that we cannot build our information policies around one type of employee. We really have to listen (in some cases it feels like we have to listen to each individual separately) and respond with policies that are adaptable and appropriate for a variety of needs.

Thanks again for all you contribute. We are about to replace our existing corporate email and calendaring solution with Google Apps and are rolling that out this year to 1800 employees in 25 countries. I have been taking this opportunity to send everyone your post on getting your inbox to zero every day.

Also I think it’s important to mention that employees would be more willing to stay longer at(and arrive earlier to) work if they were able to perform tasks at their desk that they would otherwise have to drive home to do.