See, this is where I have a HUGE problem with the OS. What if it's a document I don't want online?
PS: .DOC? Really? .DOC is so 2003.
Make no mistake about it. I like my Samsung Series 5 Chromebook a lot. I think it will become a major challenge to Windows on light-duty business desktops… eventually.
You see right now, as I’m well into week two with my Chromebook, I’m finding holes that need to be filled before I can see many businesses rolling work out on Chromebooks. Mind you, even as it is, I can see people using them for work. I am right now. But, until these problems are fixed Chromebooks aren’t going to be major business desktop players.
1. Where’s the VPN?
Chrome OS, and thus Chromebooks, actually have Virtual Private Network capability built-in, but it’s still a beta feature and it’s a pain-in-the-rump to find and activate. To turn on the VPN functionality-and other “experimental” features you need to run:
about:flags
from the address bar (aka URL bar). Then Enable VPN support from the list of Experiments.
After that, you can add a Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol/Internet Protocol Security (L2TP/IPSec) private network from the Chromebook’s network control. Currently Chrome OS supports L2TP/IPSec with either a pre-shared key or a user certificate. While L2TP/IPSec works with many VPN services, such as those from Cisco and Windows Server, it doesn’t work with all of them. For example, you can’t use L2TP/IPSec with my own favorite VPN server, OpenVPN.
It may be experimental, but I did get it to work with my Windows Server 2008 R2 VPN server without any additional trouble. The real question to me though is why the heck wasn’t this built-in and perfected before the first Chromebook shipped? To me, the market for Chromebooks has always been business and, to a lesser extent, education and both often require VPN use.
2. Some Wi-Fi Security still not supported.
While Chromebooks support most common Wi-Fi security methods, it doesn’t support all of them. The most glaring of these is that it can’t handle Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) Enterprise with Extensible Authentication Protocol-Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS) or Cisco’s Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP). Like VPN support you can activate experimental support for WPA EAP-TLS and LEAP from the obscure about:flags command page.
To me, this is another “what the heck” failure. All the important Wi-Fi security mechanisms should have been in there from the start. This isn’t rocket science. The Samsung Series 5’s Qualcomm Atheros AR5BHB116 802.11n Wi-Fi card with its Atheros AR9382 chip is already certified for WPA2 EAP-TLS so there’s no technical reason the Chromebook can’t work with this network security protocol out of the box.
Page 2: [Busted File Manager, System Access & Documentation] »
