On January 29th, Microsoft launched its new operating system: Vista. You may have heard the news reports about how very different this operating system is, with new features and an enhanced 3-D computing environment. It is truly going to take us to a new computing dimension!

The same holds true for Office 2007. This version of the Office suite is unlike anything you have seen before with menus that change based upon what you are currently working on.

This change does not come easily. At Carlow, we have undertaken an intense project plan to learn and evaluate the new operating system and Office 2007 by April 30th. Every person in I.T. is responsible for a portion of this plan. At the end of this evaluation period on April 30th, we will decide how to proceed with installation on campus. One possible outcome is that we may decide to implement only Office 2007.

While many schools are already declaring that they are waiting until Summer of 2008 to support Vista, this can be compared to stopping a train that has already left the station. We realize we must support Vista regardless of whether we upgrade older campus machines or not. We are already flooded with calls from end-users that have purchased PC's with Vista or who have upgraded to Vista. Further, any new PC's that we purchase will now come loaded and licensed for Vista with Office 2007.

You will find below the highlights of our Vista/Office 2007 testing and learning plan. We will communicate with the campus along the way, but we ask your patience as we come up to speed. Rest assured that we will hold training classes for the campus on both Vista and Office 2007 so that you can also feel comfortable with the new operating system.

Further down in this article, you will find a brief listing of some of the more common problems we have found to date with both Vista and Office.

We are working on the following as part of our Vista/Office project plan:

• Evaluating the requirements to run the various versions of Vista (memory, disk, video drivers) and evaluating every piece of our campus equipment inventory for Vista/Office readiness.
• Obtaining information on training classes and materials for our staff.
• Contacting all of our existing software vendors (over 100 vendors) to determine their readiness for Vista/Office 2007.
• Working with our campus bookstore to determine when the book publishers will be moving to the new platforms with their diagrams in their books and the CDs that they include as supplements.
• We have installed Vista/Office on a variety of testing machines in I.T. to understand how it reacts with older campus models and the newer models.
• Preparing a step-by-step installation guide for uniform installs across campus.
• Preparing a list of the new features that are most likely to be used by the campus community.
• Investigating some of the newer features, including hard disk encryption, backup features, VPN quarantining, and group policy changes that may affect our campus information security. We are also investigating other features like virtual PC’s, and private profiles (for ‘home’ use vs. ‘Carlow’ use).
• Working to investigate a plug-in for Office 2003 so that it can read Office 2007 documents. That will make Office 2007 documents compatible in either direction with Office 2003 documents. Out of the box, Office 2007 can not easily share documents with Office 2003 users.
• With regard to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, we are examining the major differences, testing these products with Blackboard and our printing environment, and preparing training classes and documentation for our end users.
• And more!