Part 1 : Office 2007 Plunge - Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007

This week I will be pushing out office 2007 to our administrative support team. I have been using office 2007 for several months now and I think it's going to be a welcome upgrade for our staff. I'll be going in late this Wednesday to make sure that everything goes smoothly. We have software assurance on all of our current XP and Office 2003 licenses. Probably one of the best decisions I’ve made here in our purchases over the last year was getting software assurance.

My plan is to do a system push by just setting up a group policy on my admin support staff OU. I'll probably go around to each workstation to make sure everything works out smoothly. We have about eighteen users that this will affect on this run through. Hopefully after about a month or so I’ll gather all the feedback and then push it out to the remainder of the staff with the pastors last due to the fact that they mostly use notebooks.

For the most part I have been extremely happy with Office 2007. One down side is that like all new MS product lines (it requires a lot more resources). This software suite is HUNGRY for memory! The end of 2006 was a much needed upgrade year for entire admin staff. We're running Dell Precision 380's with the following specs:

Pentium D 3Ghz Processors
1 GB 667 DDR2 RAM
160GB sata II 7200 rpm HDs
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285 vid cards

Due to the fact that both the video cards and amount of memory - we won't be upgrading to Vista until those resources get upped. Upgrading to Vista is a whole other beast in itself though. I've been dual booting with Vista Enterprise for a while on one of these backup systems with the exact build that the staff has and I’m just totally un-impressed with how it runs. Plus XP Pro in my opinion is great and I see no real reason to upgrade yet just for the sake of upgrading. I would say just in looking at my year’s goals and projects this isn't a necessity right now. Just for the record I’m not un-impressed with Vista – in fact I’m very impressed with a lot of the new features and I can see a great future. I’m feeling much like I did when XP was first released. It’s just not ready for the "big time". But that’s another blog….

Thursday I will be having a short training to show some of the major upgrades and changes to the software suite: ribbon, etc.
Want to give a quick thanks to Jason Lee for posting the Office 2007 overview pdf. I'll probably use some of that as a tool for our staff!
Jason Powell has a link Here for download.
Jason Lee : do you have a Blog? :)

So what are some of Your Thoughts? Are you all using Office 2007 suite yet? If so why/why not? Do you feel Office 2007 is ready for the 'big time'? Feel free to discuss!

I'll be sure to let you all know how my plunge ends up.... Pray... If you don't here back from me... well that probably means one of our staff members killed me haha.