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