Legacy does not work well with any new operating system, especially
discontinued models or companies that have been sold and restructured
several times. As for office, if people could find the time to learn
about something with betas or trials and any accompanying literature the
"shock" or "this sucks" factor would be reduced immensely. Don't have
time to learn new things, but your customer is twisting your arm to keep
up? Well that is business and progression. We are professionals and can
handle anything that comes at us together.
Be aware of your resources and allies who can help you and your dept get
through the always hard to work with initial phase, we are a strong as a
IT community, and in my department A.I.S. we have a team called M.E.S
that offers training on office 2007.
Finally ending on my initial point, if you have older equipment 8 bit
software that is not supported anymore or provided by a company that is
long gone, it is time to consider modernizing your current framework to
a more robust and compatible base. It is that simple.
I would rather hear on this list, what you had that didn't work and what
your change was to make it work, or I would love to hear about something
unique that your group found out how to do that could be applied on this
campus. Not rants.
Timo
Timoteo "Timo" Vasquez - AIS
Departmental Systems and Services
[log in to unmask] - 353.4420 Ext.249
Michigan State University
2 Administration Building
East Lansing, MI 48824-1046
From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Hoort, Brian
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Vista and Office 2007
NAGers:
Vista: I've been running Vista full-time on my workstation for nearly a
year. We were planning on rolling out Vista by now, or at least in the
Spring. As things look now, no way. I seriously doubt we'll do it even
in the Spring. Like others, I'll wait until M$ "finishes writing it"
and especially, the software and hardware vendors catch up to it. Just
a month or two ago I looked into several statistical packages we use and
one of three I looked at ran on Vista. PalmOne is still only in beta
with Vista as of yesterday (I checked, yet again), I've had problems
with HP inkjet drivers and Maxtor One-Touch backup software (which is
still totally broken, even after a new release) Until vendor support
catches up and stabilizes, we will not be going Vista.
User on it so far: 1
Expected by end of Spring semester: 1
Office 2007: I've been on it for 6 months now and still find it super
annoying. I don't know who these people are that say they learned it
quickly. Roughly once a week I spend ~5-20 minutes looking for some
stupid, simple function that I've known how to find for over 10 years.
I always try to find it myself first, it is "easier to use!", of course,
but I usually end up resorting to searching for it in the Help. No
users have it yet and when asked about it, I show them the ribbon and so
far all have said "no thanks", though I'd let anyone have it if
requested. We have pushed out the compatibility pack, and that appears
to have slowed requests for the product. I'll quietly try and skip it
entirely, if possible, as I don't see a need. Some faculty will want
the new "pretty" (and more distracting) 3D graphs, however, so I expect
requests to come in from that eventually.
User on it so far: 0
Expected by end of Spring semester: perhaps half-dozen to dozen
Brian Hoort
Agricultural Economics
