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

 

 

 

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