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Enough Office 2003/2007 articles

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Office 2003 is old and retired for many of us. While 2007 is still in widespread use, it has been around for about 3 years now and I really don’t need articles about how to use the ribbon interface any more.

TR editors: please get some people to write about Office 2010. Enough Office 2003/2007 all the time. The beta/RC versions of Office 2010 have been published about a year ago I think (didn’t keep track of it), and the final version was released some time ago; I and several others are already using it.

I control software deployment for 90 machines, most of which are currently on Windows 7 + Office 2007 SP2. I’m starting to migrate them all now (first of all the few remaining XP and Vista laptops, and a couple of Office 2003 installations).

I’d like to read more about *new* products – such as Office 2010 and Windows 7. There is still way too much about XP as well (like the endlessly recycled “10 useful XP registry edits”).

Please move on, this is getting boring!

Topic

Business Applications

In reply to Enough Office 2003/2007 articles

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

I started to go in that direction, but

In reply to Business Applications

how much is there left to say about 03 or 07?

Just over half of my 225 systems still run 03, and the rest have been upgraded to 07. I’m the only one in the building running 10, but I’d like to see more articles on it before I deploy it, not two or three years after I’ve rolled it out.

I’m not saying drop the 03 / 07 articles entirely, but the mix of articles should be weighted more toward 10.

Quite the opposite here

In reply to Business Applications

I also work in a large enterprise – with circa 7000 employees spread over 7 countries, ISO-certified.

Somehow, I believe that in many cases (I am *not* specifically referring to you), the argument ‘business applications’ is nonsense – it’s just an unwillingness to invest some time and research into making it work. I’m sure there *are* those who actually have the issue you describe – but I doubt all of those bringing this argument actually fall into that category.

In my company, if something new is available, and it’s an improvement over the previous version and doesn’t present any compatibility issues, we simply go for it. And if there are compatibility issues, we do our absolute best to solve them, while still switching to the newest version.

For example, why not put those few annoying XP-only tools in (a sandboxed) ‘XP Mode’? Make sure the XP VM only has access to company LAN, not to outside internet – if you need only IP connectivity, that’s easily done using DNS.

I completely agree with the other argument here – there is no sense for us, IT professionals, to be reading about Office 2003 now. We know all we need to know, and if we don’t, we’ll find it on Google. What we need is more about new technologies.

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