Palm doesn't support Vista 64, but could without much effort. There are lessons to be learned by in-house IT from how Palm is flubbing the situation. It’s hard to fathom. And if you get bored by what follows, skip to the end: The anecdote might not be of interest but the lesson for IT ought to be.A few postings ago, I threw a tantrum regarding Palm’s failure to support Vista 64 (“You aren’t in good hands with Palm,” Advice Line, 12/23/2008). In response, several correspondents and commenters pointed me to some board postings that recommended using Bluetooth to connect my wife’s Treo 700p to her new Vista 64 laptop.To make a not-very-long story short, I did, and it worked. That it isn’t a very long story tells the story: Most laptops these days have built-in Bluetooth; for those that don’t, external Bluetooth adapters aren’t all that expensive. The most difficult challenge is the due diligence needed to make sure the Bluetooth solution you’re looking at is Vista 64 compatible. Sometimes it gets weird. For example, we inherited a Kensington adapter a friend no longer needed. Its drivers didn’t work, but an entirely different set of drivers, intended for an entirely different piece of hardware did.Anyway, the total time needed to get my wife’s Treo working through Bluetooth, excluding the drive time we invested to pick up the hand-me-down adapter, was maybe 15 minutes, including the reboot.Go to Palm’s website and you’ll go away convinced, as I was, that you have to choose between Vista 64 and a Treo as your smartphone of choice. Palm’s exact words were:64-bit edition support Palm does not support Palm Desktop or HotSync synchronization with Microsoft Windows 64-bit editions. Palm Desktop runs on 32-bit and 16-bit editions of Windows only. Synchronization via Exchange ActiveSync is unaffected by this limitation. Had Palm instead invested perhaps a developer-week of effort validating that the Palm Desktop and Outlook 2007 conduits install just fine under Vista 64, and checking that its various Bluetooth-enabled devices have no trouble synchronizing through Bluetooth once they’ve paired with a Bluetooth-enabled PC, Palm could instead have published these words: 64-bit edition support Palm Desktop is not warranted to run under Windows 64. In most situation it intalls as a 32-bit application under Windows 64 and operates properly, but it could exhibit anomalous behavior in some situations. Palm does not provide drivers for or otherwise support USB-cable-based synchronization with Microsoft Windows 64-bit editions. Instead, we recommend the use of Bluetooth to establish the connection. See the documentation for your Palm smartphone for instructions on how to go about this. Lesson for IT Yes, there is one. How many IT shops take the Palm approach? Faced with a choice between investing a modest amount of effort in determing whether something useful might work just fine and Just Saying No, so-called best practice generally consists of Just Saying No. The next time an end-user department wants to try something innovative that calls for a piece of technology IT doesn’t currently support, try something different: Have someone spend a few hours assessing the likelihood of it working, and the downside risk. The usual worst-case is restoring a system to the standard build; the usual best-case is shaving 10% or more off the cost of some business process or other. Assuming that turns out to be the case, adopt a new, better-than-best practice: Just Say Yes … and then explain the limits to what Yes means. – Bob Technology Industry