Software

While I in no way speak directly or indirectly for the editorial staff at TR, the bulk of the members of the TR community are supporting corporate and small business companies. As such, these communities are often 3 or more years behind Microsoft releases and often take months to even deploy service packs and updates.

Where I work, we still have DOS 3 and even older systems still in daily use. Many desktop users are still running Office 2000. For the most part, we are still running IE 6 as our browser.

Not that we are Luddites or cheap. In many cases, our custom applications or corporate web based applications do not work with newer versions of Microsoft software. As these are business critical applications, we cannot afford any errors that might come up from deploying new versions of software. Once the decision is made to upgrade or replace an application, it can take a year or more to reach deployment.

As such, we are still supporting, and still training users on the older applications. The amount of feedback from the repeated Windows XP and Office 2003 articles should be a clear indication that there are a lot of people out there that are still learning both.

Take Office as an example. If some users are using Office 2007 and most users are using Office 2003, there is a problem with sharing documents and working on them as a team.

As to the ribbon interface itself, I would like to see articles on how to defeat and remove this space wasting POS interface. I'll take a 4 key hot-key sequence over the ribbon any day.

Anyhow, you will see TR articles shift to different versions of software and different technologies as the bulk of the community adapts newer technology.

Chas