Vista case studies

[ady]

Hi. I'm new here and found this forum whilst searching for case studies on institutions that have decided to chance it with Vista.

A bit of background first; I am an IT technician for a college and my manager has asked me to look into Vista and Office 2007 deployment options. Like many here, it's not something we're looking to do for some time yet, but it is an inevitability, hence why I've been asked to take action.

I am also working towards a degree which I am doing in tandem with my job and I have opted to make this investigative research into the rollout of Vista and Office 2007 the subject for my final year dissertation project. I'm aware of the BECTA report regarding Vista and Office, but there has to be some institutions that have gone ahead anyway, and this forum seems like a likely place to find such institutions.

As such, what I am looking for is any testimonies from anyone representing an institution that has rolled out Vista and/or Office 2007. I'm particularly interested in user preceptions (staff and students), the implications on the overall IT infrastructure (hardware upgrades etc) and any issues involving training that have arisen through changing over to Vista/Office 2007.

Any information on how the "upgrade" has affected a given institution in the light of the aforementioned criteria would be gratefully received as it would help both my future deployment planning and my dissertation project.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[zag]

Don't confuse Office 2007 and Vista, you are talking about 2 seperate projects here.

Vista is a long way away imo, i'm thinking maybe 2 or 3 years maybe more. It's just not ready for a rollout yet. Maybe SP2 will help

Office 2007 is great, we use it site wide here. A couple of comments on it.

- Training was very easy, just a quick 30min session was all our staff needed to get used to the new ribbon. Zero issues since then.
- Filesizes are smaller, DOCX and XLSX are now default for our school and no one really notices the difference. Our backup has reduced significantly since we made them default. Only problems we have had is people sending files to the council or home, but this is very minor and its easy to save things in 2003 format as it has a massive button on the save as dialogue
- Hardware needed to run office 2007 is a little bigger but some extra ram was needed in a few of our older machines. We recomend 512mb as standard now.
- Works well with sharepoint and integrates nicely with it as an internal VLE
- Passwords are more secure and not as easy to hack.
- 2007 is alot easier to install manually copy and paste the cd key is a god send!

[ady]

Don't confuse Office 2007 and Vista, you are talking about 2 seperate projects here.

Yeah, I know. I just consolidated them above as it was quicker to type.

Office 2007 is great, we use it site wide here. A couple of comments on it.

- Training was very easy, just a quick 30min session was all our staff needed to get used to the new ribbon. Zero issues since then.
- Filesizes are smaller, DOCX and XLSX are now default for our school and no one really notices the difference. Our backup has reduced significantly since we made them default. Only problems we have had is people sending files to the council or home, but this is very minor and its easy to save things in 2003 format as it has a massive button on the save as dialogue
- Hardware needed to run office 2007 is a little bigger but some extra ram was needed in a few of our older machines. We recomend 512mb as standard now.
- Works well with sharepoint and integrates nicely with it as an internal VLE
- Passwords are more secure and not as easy to hack.
- 2007 is alot easier to install manually copy and paste the cd key is a god send!

Yeah, this is just the sort of thing I'm after, so thanks very much for your comments. Incidentally, what is the name of your institution so I can reference it? Cheers.

[techyphil]

Yeh Office 2007 is mint. Applied a *.MSP file which contains all the settings and what you want installing. Stuck that in the updates folder and ran the setup.exe

No need for switches or anything. It will simply look for any files in that folder and use them.

Although we're not using on any of the schools workstations yet.

btw does it work ok with sims? I would imagine so myself but just for i'd ask.

[FN-GM]

2007 is alot easier to install manually copy and paste the cd key is a god send!

I agree, good to see Microsoft got something right.

[DSapseid]

btw does it work ok with sims? I would imagine so myself but just for i'd ask.

Office 2007 works fine with SIMS.

[FragglePete]

Office 2007 works fine with SIMS.

Apparently there is an issue with Document Management Server on SIMS with .docx files. We had a SIMS engineer on site a few weeks ago and I got talking with him about it, he recommends using the ADM templates to force users to use 2003 .doc files if saving back to DMS. We don't really us the DMS part here so its not been an issue.

We're about 50% coverage with Office 2007 now, and intend to get that to 100% for the next academic year.

Had no real issues, although the head looked like a startled rabbit when he fired up Word 2007 for the first time and I had to explain the finer issues of the Ribbon to him; he's a complete luddit on technology but haven't heard a peep from him for weeks now so he's coping ok. The only real confusion we've had is the different files formats, but that will go away in September.

Pete

[georgebush]

We have issues with certain bits exporting to Excel 2007 from SIMs, its easy enough to work around and I'm sure crapita will fix it soon enough.