BT has launched a range of home service options that will enable customers to troubleshoot IT problems. The BT Home IT visit scheme will see engineers visiting broadband customers to put right any queries or concerns about their home PC use - at a cost of £75 for the first hour, £25 for each subsequent half hour. Despite the cost, BT is expecting the service to be in demand.

Thin client technology has come of age and can help boost security and trim IT costs, according to a panel of users. With the PC now 25 years old, a number of competing technologies - such as thin clients and new entrants like blade PCs - are providing companies with more options. Last month Gartner warned the PC will face more competition as cheap bandwidth and processing power make new styles of application delivery possible

Wiltshire County Council has signed a new £12m outsourcing deal with Steria as part of an overhaul of its IT infrastructure. Steria beat off competition from 21 other applicants for the five-year managed IT services deal and replaces incumbent supplier Sunguard Vivista on 1 October 2006. The fully managed service will support 3,500 council staff, with 900 based at County Hall in Trowbridge and the rest scattered across more than 200 sites in Wiltshire.

Only companies signed up to Microsoft's Software Assurance scheme are likely to adopt Office 2007 in the near future because IT managers find it extremely hard to justify an Office upgrade to their board, according to analyst group Gartner. Speaking at the Midsize Enterprise Summit in Paris on Wednesday, Gartner principal research analyst Annette Jump said research done by the group showed only about two per cent of companies who aren't signed up to Microsoft's Software Assurance (SA) scheme had adopted the previous version of the productivity suite - Office 2003.

The NHS has signed a seven-year contract with Fujitsu Services which will see the supplier provide service desk support for health service IT applications. Under the contract - valued at £41m for the "core service" - Fujitsu will provide support for the NHS' National Programme for IT (NPfIT) applications. NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) said the deal will allow the health service to get "professional, scaleable and consistent first-line support" for its applications.

Companies are tightening up access to their IT systems in the face of hackers and regulatory pressure. A survey of companies in eight European countries and the US by Forrester Consulting found that there are big budgets for identity management and access control projects. One third of organisations surveyed said they plan to have strong authentication or two-factor authentication capabilities within 12 months.

UK train operator GNER has announced that a project to equip all of its trains with wi-fi will be competed nine months ahead of schedule. Currently the operator of the East Coast Line, which runs from London Kings Cross through cities such as Peterborough, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh, offers wi-fi on a number of services. The further rollout will see all of its rebuilt Mallard trains fully equipped for wireless internet access by August 2006 - a full nine months earlier than the previous scheduled completion date of May 2007.

BT has won a £25m contract with Balfour Beatty to provide networked IT services to the construction giant. The deal will see BT consolidate Balfour Beatty's various distributed networks into one multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) data network which will serve 500 UK offices and project locations - including short term building sites.

Unisys has launched a new offshore services and software development centre in Shanghai as part of the continued expansion of its operations in China. The Shanghai centre will employ around 1,000 people over the next three years and provide application development, IT and business process outsourcing services, technical helpdesk and support services to Unisys' global customers.

Capgemini is offering to help plug IT departments' skills gaps when it comes to managing mobile deployments. The newly launched Capgemini Mobile Support service is designed to help companies rolling out handhelds that run on a Windows operating systems.