06/20/07 - Administrative Offices: Office 2007 Next Steps

In a week or so Computer Support will announce the availability of the Office 2007 upgrade. There are some things to check before introducing it into your department's software ecology

1. If you have commercial software which interacts with Office you should seek assurance about compatibility with Office 2007 before your department goes through the upgrade. If you have automation developed in house you should contact the Help Desk about how you can test it with Office 2007 and assure yourself that it will not be broken by the upgrade.

2. Get trained on the new look and menu structure. The May Word, Excel and Powerpoint workshops will be repeated in August. Or earlier if there is enough interest. Call Melissa James x5543 in Lifelong Learning and get on the list.

3. Encourage all users you share Office files with to install the compatibility patch so that different versions of Office will read each other's files. See http://techhelp.mcla.edu/converter.

Several administrative offices have special purpose software packages that are crucial to the service they deliver. Major ones, such as Raiser's Edge in Alumni/Development or HRCMS in Personnel have large companies behind them which can be queried about issues that may arise when using them with Office 2007 software or documents. Computer Support Services has contacted several offices with those that we are aware of and we have already started to identify where problems may exist and where the upgrade will not create an issue.

There are other cases in which Computer Support may not be aware of such critical software or in which the "software" may be an Excel spread sheet or Access database that was developed in house. In these cases we have to depend on department staff to identify the potential for trouble. Clearly, you do not want to do an Office upgrade that will prevent you from using your accounting system.