Office 2007 Productivity in Business

As a Business Architect I use Microsoft office 2003 professional for business running on XP but for home use we have a student version of 2007 purely so my son is working on the new platform to align with what is being used for school.

Last evening I had to use the home machine to do a domestic task, printing some photos, and was starting to play around with the new version. What I found stunning was the fact that nearly everything has moved into different places, menu structures and the like. Most of the functionality seems to be similar but "prettied up" in a icon driven manner. Finding where familiar old things were was a nightmare and to me somewhat frustrating.

What struck me was the productivity impact on business because my speed of doing things was dramatically reduced due to trying to work out where everything had gone.

I thought if this was deployed in a customer services division of say 500 people the short term effect of productivity and customer service coupled with the cost of retraining staff could be considerable, all in pursuit of glitz. This is classic example of technology having impact on people and process without things really being thought through. Although we can't doing anything about it the lesson can help us in situations where we are deploying in house technology because similar effects occur during system implementation.

Software providers tell us all the time that they focus on productivity but here we have a strange reversal.

Larger businesses seem to to run many years behind the consumer, probably two sets of upgrades old, so I wonder when 2007 will hit the business sector and what effect it will have. Perhaps by then home uses will already be using 2007 and therefore staff will not see it as a big change?

My own decision is when do I upgrade? most of my clients are still running 2003 or even windows NT or even Office 2000 so from that point of view not yet, however as I train in colleges as well as commercially my own skills are now effectively behind the times. I always considered myself a "super user" of office applications but the experience of the first use 2007 made me gulp.

There is obviously a bit of a learning curve here and the prospect of spending considerable time working through tutorials and guides/books to re build my super user status is a liitle galling when there are more lucrative things to be doing - thanks Bill.

This of course ignores the cost element as buying a new commercial version of Office Professional and Visio plus a laptop capable of driving it all sensibly is the best part of £1000. Don't even mention MS Project because that is serious cash and a subject for another rant!