Discussed putting Office 2007 on our managed desktop last night - and agreed to do it this summer. Currently we have Office 2003 on it, but new PCs and laptops come equipped with Office 2007 and have done for a while. So many members of the University, especially students, are using Office 2007 on their own machines and are surprised when they come to University and find Office 2003 on the managed desktop. The Microsoft treadmill is not something we particularly want to be on, but in this case, it's unavoidable - we're supposed to be an innovative department, and providing out of date software hardly supports that vision!
There will be communication and training issues, but nothing insurmountable. Now, I'm just about to update my mac to Office 2008 and see what differences there are!
6 comments:
Don't suppose there is any chance of CiCS providing OpenOffice for those who don't wish to move to Office 2007 (not that I tend to use the managed PCs that often, but I suspect some people might)?
You should try NeoOffice for your Mac it is a free OS X port of Open Office. It opens and saves MS Office files with no problems.
...and unlike MS Word it knows how to do bullet lists :)
I would suggest openoffice too -- universities, unlike corporate entities are often about freedom of choice and experimentation. How's the Zimbra pilot going?
I'd also suggest trying OpenOffice. OOorg 3 is imminent and a test build is available for people to try out.
It's particularly nice to use if you don't like the new Office navigation (it took me forever to work out how to do Paragraph marks in 2007) and supports the new Microsoft OOXML document formats.
And of course, it costs nothing to acquire.
FYI, CiCS is starting a project (see the CiCS
Programme Plan) to look at our 'Open Document Strategy', including OpenOffice.
we do give all students a copy of open office when they register with us, and staff can either ask us for a copy or download it. I can't see us making it available on the managed service though as we already have office on there. Although Pablo rightly points out that we have a project to look at these issues.
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