Here’s the deal. I have a new consulting client, a nonprofit agency whose director wants to know whether they should upgrade their systems, both hardware and software. They’ve got $30K in the budget for the rest of ’03 and more available in ’04. Here are the basic questions:
1) They have 25 users running Win 3x, 95, and 98 in the home office. Most are networked to the NT4.0 with SP6 server. Only a few have internet access.
The director doesn’t want to give everyone Inet access, saying they don’t need it. The part-time IT person is afraid the NT4/SP6 box is going to die a horrible death soon (reasons unclear at first on-site visit.)
Comments requested on merits of sticking with NT4/SP6 versus upgrade to say Windows 2000 Server?
2) PARADOX FOR DOS 4.5. (Please save your flames and taunts about one; they know it’s an archaic program.) But it’s all they’ve ever had. They use the old flat-file approach (everything in one table, a new table each calendar year). Users go to the machine, run their queries (manually), print the results, and do their work off those printouts. An average of only 13,000 records are entered every year.
A number of options abound for upgrading the database, from MS Access to MSDE to MySQL to…
Here’s the rub: The director is deathly afraid of users’ pushback. They don’t think the database is broken, so they don’t want to fix it. They don’t want to learn something new.
What I’d like to know from fellow TechRepublic members is if there’s a proven technique for selling the change, making the change, and training the new system while causing the least amount of user “freakout” possible.
Any of you folks successfully upgraded a client like this one? I’d love to hear your advice.
-jeffd