TechTalks Transcript
Office XP: Strategic and Practical Considerations
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Bob Mahoney [BH] |
 Tony Saxman [TS] |
 Greg Scott [GS] |
May 17, 2001
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JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for spring of 2001 and to this session on Office XP and Its Strategic and Practical Fit into the University and Workplace Setting. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session is coming to you today with the support of the CREN member institutions and Microsoft, the leader in software for your campus. Remember Microsoft for your collaboration and productivity needs.
I'd like to welcome Bob Mahoney from MIT today, who is our guest technology anchor for Tech Talk, who is filling in for Howard. Howard is off in Australia this week and had even thought about doing the Tech Talk from there until he learned that his travel schedule meant that he was on an airplane at the time and we decided, well, you know, while we love to do cutting edge technology, we decided we wouldn't do that! So let me introduce Bob. He is the Senior Network Engineer in MIT's Network Operations Group and he manages the MIT Network Security team. Bob, welcome to Tech Talks.
BM: Thank you, Judith. I'm Bob Mahoney, filling in for Howard Strauss as the technology anchor for today's Tech Talk webcast. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest experts, Greg Scott and Tony Saxman from the Oregon State University College of Business. We will try to answer all your questions and those very important follow-up questions. As always, you can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net at anytime during the webcast. If we don't get to all of your questions during the webcast, we will provide an answer in the webcast archive.
In 1979, WordStar Word Processor was first released. It was the first really successful product of its type and it changed forever the experience of putting pen to paper. By the mid-1980's, there were more than two dozen commercial word processors available. It was not until the introduction of 1979 of VisiCalc that spreadsheet software gained real popularity, and by the early 1980's Lotus 1-2-3 had become the dominant entry in the early spreadsheet market.
Personal productivity software continues to evolve. The relatively recent editions of presentation graphics and personal database products has proved enormously popular and the integration of such product suites with previously separate calendaring, e-mail and networking applications promises both new challenges and new functionality. The Office Application Suite is certainly one of Microsoft's highest profile product lines. Word, Excel and PowerPoint firmly dominate their respective categories and both Outlook and Access are strong players in their own right. Microsoft's newest Office package is Office XP which will begin shipping at the end of this month. Microsoft has worked hard to ensure the continued success of Office and Office XP introduces significant new features to encourage users to upgrade including integrated voice recognition technology. A new subscription licensing option as well as a new product activation mechanism will also change the way that users buy and manage their Office software.
Today we're going to ask our experts to talk about their experiences testing and deploying Office XP at Oregon State and hopefully help our listeners prepare for the introduction of Office XP to their own desktops. There's much to cover, so we should begin. Judith?
JB: Well, thank you very much, Bob, and you know, as we are ever hopeful that the office productivity software will become, in fact, more human-centric, I had a chance to play a little bit with Office XP and found that the little Office assistant, Clippie, is still with us, although I guess we have more control over it. But at any rate, it's an exciting time as we see office productivity software evolving, so let us introduce the two experts today and see what their experiences have been.
Our two experts today are Greg Scott and Tony Saxman from the Oregon State University College of Business. Greg is the IS Manager for the College of Business where he's been leading the strategic and tactical planning and services for over 15 years. His department includes a profit center for quality assurance for technology companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Novell and Microsoft-not surprising, and I think that's probably why they were beta testing the Office XP. Welcome to Tech Talk, Greg.
GS: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here�
JB: Well, great. And then our second expert is Tony Saxman who is the Instructional Computing Coordinator working with Greg at the College of Business at Oregon State and Tony is responsible for the user side of the college network. He installs, maintains and upgrades over 300 [inaudible] computers, heads up user support for faculty and staff and also manages a computer lab of 140 PC's for student use so he'll be able to answer all those great, really hands-on questions. Welcome, Tony.
TS: Thank you, Judith. It's good to be here.
JB: That's great! By the way, I just have to include this. I understand that you were a mental health therapist for 13 years.
TS: That's correct.
JB: You find that comes in handy, huh?
TS: There are times when people are under stress that they could use a little mental health!
JB: All right, well, great. Well, let's go ahead and get started with our questions as we've got a lot to cover today. Bob, do you want to start?
BM: Sure.
BM: Greg, to start off, the simple question - just what is Office XP and what does the name stand for?
GS: Well, Office XP is the next generation of Microsoft's desktop productivity suite. The previous version was called Office 2000. They've named this new version XP. My understanding, the XP stands for "experience." So those individuals who are familiar with Microsoft Office products, this is essentially the next generation in that suite.
JB: That sounds great. But isn't it kind of soon to have another upgrade since the release of Office 2000? It's kind of quick, isn't it?
GS: I guess from my standpoint, I don't think so. We're certainly interested in deploying new tools to our end users, getting new solutions out there. We think XP does a better job of integrating with the web and it certainly, we believe, does a better job of integrating with Windows 2000. And since we're already buying our software essentially on a subscription basis, I'd be perfectly content to have an upgrade every year!
JB: Aha! Okay.
TS: Judith, this is Tony. I think, too, that it's the nature of the beast, so to speak. With technology the way it is, things are developing rapidly and you know, everybody wants their hands on the newest, latest, as soon as they can so I think it's representative of that.
JB: Okay. Well, how does this fit, how does Office XP fit within the Microsoft offerings, though? I've heard rumors about Windows XP and different versions, all the rest of it. Is there an easy way to kind of sort these all out?
GS: Well, you're correct. There has been some discussion about the fact that there's the Windows XP which is not shipping yet. I believe the official word on that is it ships October 25th and that will be the desktop version. The server version is going to follow sometime later, I believe early next year.
JB: Okay.
GS: This is the desktop productivity suite and it is true, it does have the same name, nomenclature similar to what Microsoft did with the Windows 2000 and Office 2000 suites, so the naming convention and the consistency of the name across their suite of products is not new to them. It's something that they've done. They've done this before.
BM: Now, Tony, I noticed that there was a professional version and a developer version. Are these the sort of differences we've seen in some of the earlier packages, where it's a bundling difference?
TS: That's correct. They bundle a different suite of packages, software that is included in the different versions, that's correct.
BM: For the people who are running a current version now, can you characterize how much of an update, how much of an upgrade this is? How much change they are likely to see?
TS: I think there are some things that will be fairly significant. For example, the inclusion of voice recognition and those kind of applications are going to be fairly different, something that they haven't seen in previous versions. Integration with the web is going to be new and different for people. And I guess I would classify it as a fairly significant upgrade. I saw Office 2000 as a fairly major upgrade from Office 97. I wouldn't classify this quite in that category, but it's still a fairly decent upgrade.
GS: From my perspective, we're certainly seeing a lot more intelligence in the applications and by that, I mean the applications are monitoring fairly actively what the user's doing and it tends to remember that so that it learns from your behavior and then it tends to predict, to some extent, the kinds of things you might want to do next.
JB: Well, that sounds almost really futuristic. Can you give us an example of what that is?
GS: Really simple stuff, for example, I have an Outlook which is what I use for e-mail and I'm addressing a letter and I start typing in a name. It does a really good job of attempting to keep track of to whom I address my mail, so I typed in - usually by about the third or fourth letter of typing, it displays a window of all the names that correspond to those first three or four letters. And then as I send mail to people more and more frequently, it gets more intelligent about being able to predict to whom I'm addressing this particular note.
TS: That is true across the applications. It's something that you've seen before, if you've used Internet Explorer or other web browsers where you begin to type a URL and if it's been one you've used before, it pops up the complete URL and you can just choose from that list. This is similar in the Office applications. For example, in word, if there's something in particular that you type over and over again, your signature or something, Word XP will pick that up and complete it for you if you'd like.
BM: Tony, I know that there's a lot of talk about web integration in a host of areas for applications software. Are we at the point yet where a disconnected user is at a disadvantage?
TS: I think yes, I think we are at that point. I think if you choose or if you are disconnected from the web, there are features and opportunities that you miss out on. I wouldn't say necessarily that it keeps you from doing your work. I just think that the tools that are available via the web add to and enhance your productivity and ability to complete certain tasks.
JB: Can you give an example, perhaps, as a person is working, what kinds of resources from the web are integrated into what they're doing?
TS: Sure. One of the things that I picked up on very quickly was in the Office XP applications, there is a task pane that includes links to the web. So for example, if I want to create a balance sheet, there is a link to the new templates that Microsoft provides out on the web and I can easily bring up a beginning balance sheet to get myself started so that a lot of the preliminary work and some of even the formulas and calculations that I might need to enter in are done already for me. I just need to change them to fit my particular use. And there are literally hundreds of those templates out there on the web. And now with the task pane, they're just one or two clicks away.
GS: Another solution or another item like this that Tony demonstrated to me was graphics. Everybody's always looking for graphics and Windows XP - excuse me, there, I did it myself! Office XP gives you the option of going out and searching the website - I believe it's Microsoft's site - for graphic images. And we found that to be pretty handy.
JB: You know, I noticed that you mentioned - I think it was Tony - a task pane. Maybe our listeners want to know how that pane is spelled.
TS: P-A-N-E!
JB: P-A-N-E, as in windowpane, as opposed to any other kind of pane.
TS: And it is generally by default turned off. It's something that you can turn on and leave on and it will always be on, and I have, but typically, it doesn't have to be on all the time.
JB: All right, so it is in a sense an agent that's sitting there, that's available to you then if you want it?
TS: Correct.
JB: Okay.
BM: Greg, that image repository that you mentioned, that is - you said it was a Microsoft site.
GS: Tony, you may have to correct me on this. I believe that was a Microsoft site?
TS: I believe it is linked to a site where they have clip art, just stored on their server and I believe that it is true.
GS: And while I've used it, I've not really paid a whole lot of attention to where it resides. And that may, in fact, be part of the Microsoft message. The technology has reached a point now where you don't have to think a whole lot more about where to go to get something. This stuff's becoming pretty tightly integrated.
BM: Well, I wondered because I have a friend who is an intellectual property lawyer and so issues of who owns images and where they come from-�
GS: Sure, sure.
BM: -those are foremost in their mind.
JB: What about, let's go back for just a moment into your particular environment at Oregon State in the College of Business. You've been beta testing Office XP. What's the environment in which you are in and are you going to be deploying this anytime soon?
GS: Well, the answer to the last question is we will be deploying it. In fact, we're only waiting for the CD which we anticipate arriving next week, and my commitment is as soon as the CD arrives, we will actually begin the deployment. But to go back to your original question about the environment, we have about 18 production servers, about 300 desktops in the building supporting roughly 120 or so faculty and staff. We have about 5,500 students of which about 1800 are business students and the remainder are non-business students taking business courses so we can support all of those individuals as well. It's pretty much a Windows 2000 environment, both in terms of the servers and the desktops, so we've been pretty actively deploying those. Tony completed the desktop deployment last December.
BM: Greg, you said that you had been using the product since February.
GS: I've been using it since February, both at home - a Sony notebook - and at my desktop.
BM: Actually, how many people at the college have been participating in the beta test and how long have they been doing it?
GS: I think maybe around eight or ten. We have, besides the IS staff within the college, the MIS faculty. It's the Management Information Systems faculty who teach our technology skills courses have been most actively involved in working on testing it. And because they teach the technology courses, they want to understand the implications of changes within the technology because that affects how they teach and what they teach and it also affects some of the tools that they develop to support their teaching. So we tend to include them fairly early in any new products that we expect to deploy.
JB: What about the question, as we're starting to look at the upgrading, about compatibility with previous Office Suite products? Are there any problems there? What advice could you give people to watch for?
TS: I think that that's a good question, Judith, given that what people remember from the upgrade from Office 95 to Office 97 was somewhat of a disaster. There were incompatibility issues as far as going backwards. I think Microsoft learned its lesson and got beat up enough that in their Office 2000 upgrade, they included a very, very strong backwards compatibility feature. And Office XP includes that same line of thinking and technology. It is very compatible with former versions.
JB: Well, let's do a follow-up question. Actually, we've gotten a question in from Mindy Tuttle at the University of Iowa Office Support. And she has a question that is linked to probably many user support groups would have this. She's asking, "With an Office XP Professional installation, how many addition versions of MS Office can coexist, are recommended or are compatible on one workstation?" I know that has lots of pieces of questions to it.
TS: Right. Well, I think that's a good question that Mindy brings up because the answer is very pointed. If you install different versions of Office on the same workstation, you will experience many difficulties. What you get is applications that override each other's DLL's-Dynamic Link Library files-and also the registry will then compete, trying to understand which version you are currently using. And you'll find al sorts of chaos, basically, and so I'd - we've tried it in the past and don't recommend that people install different versions of Office on the same machine and try to run them.
However, if you're using - like for example, if you have different departments and one department is upgraded, the other one is not and you want to share applications or files back and forth. That's the area that Microsoft has tried to cater to more and provide an opportunity to be able to save in older versions and send files back and forth. I liken it, when you're looking at upgrading anything, people are asking for more and more features and then they use those features and then if you try to go backwards to an older version, obviously it doesn't have those features. And so there's an obvious conflict there. So the more you can make your environment homogeneous, the better you are. But Microsoft has provided tools to be able to go backwards and forwards now.
BM: Greg, I'd like to ask you a little bit about the experience of the beta test itself.
BM: How smoothly it went, what sort of feedback you were able to provide and just for other people that might be contemplating entering a large beta test like this, how did it go?
GS: Well, let me clarify, within the context of my testing group downstairs, they were not officially part of this particular test. Tony has actually been the lead person with respect to testing the software and we were not officially part of Microsoft's testing program with respect to this product. So we got to it fairly late in the process and at a time when it was really pretty stable. I think one of the things that we've seen in the version we're running right now is that when a problem does surface, it does give you the option of filling out a form that goes directly back to the development group, and I've done that, oh, I think maybe two or three times over the last couple of months. Not very recently, I might add. So that aspect of the technology is, I think, kind of interesting in that it points Microsoft in a direction of attempting to collect information in a more structured fashion and to make sure that it's channeled to the appropriate folks to respond. And we don't necessarily hear anything directly from them, so it's a little bit like casting notes into a wishing well.
BM: Okay.
GS: But as far as our experience has been, because the product reached us fairly late in the development cycle, it was already pretty stable and I haven't seen very much of what I would characterize as really bugs.
BM: Fair enough.
GS: Does that answer your question?
BM: No, it does. Tony, a question for you. The features that might cause me to want to run to the store and upgrade to this when it's available, can you entice us with some of what you've found exciting about the product?
TS: Sure. I think I've mentioned already, I'm a big fan of the task pane already, the ability to have this little sidebar that allows me to bring in other resources within the application is very positive for me. One of the things that is included in that is an enhanced clip - what am I trying to say? - clipboard. When you put stuff on the clipboard, before you got little icons and you weren't sure which icon was for which clip that you saved. They've got a little smarter and when you point your mouse at it, it gives you a preview of what that clip is so that you know to bring it in or not. Those are some small little things, but they enhance your productivity.
I think the other things that I've come to like, in Outlook, I used to come in in the morning and I'd have seven or eight reminders pop up and I'd have to go through them all one at a time. What they have now is a reminder window that pops up with a listing of any reminders that you do have so that you can go through them all at once. That's very useful. I really thought that the microphone portion, the voice recognition portion of the application was going to be a kind of high cool feature but not much really usefulness. I've found that in the morning, you can come in and use your hands for other things while telling Outlook to open your next message and delete it or reply to it or whatever you want by giving it voice commands. It makes it so your hands are free. I think that'll be more useful for people who have disabilities or carpal tunnel, that kind of thing. It also includes voice recognition dictation which allows you to dictate either Outlook messages or Word documents, that kind of thing. Those are nice features.
BM: A small follow-up for that, for the users who may actually have a repetitive strain injury now and have other software installed, do you have any notion as to whether there is a possibility of conflict?
TS: No, I don't. We've used Dragon Naturally Speaking before and I haven't seen any real conflict with it. I think they wind up being quite separate applications. You use either one or the other.
JB: And you use them for different things, then?
TS: Yes. I think people will use the voice commands application quite a bit more than they'll use the voice recognition software in the Office product.
JB: This probably leads us into another question, having to do with training. Are you going to be offering in your college specific training classes on this new XP version?
TS: Yes, I think that will be our plan. Typically, in a university environment, we try to offer sort of a seminar sort of a situation but it's difficult to get everybody in the room at the same time so what we give them is a flavor and then we try to do handouts and other mailings of things so people have some information. Then if they have specific questions, they call and somebody can come and give them a shortened version of a demo or something.
GS: I think it's also important to note that this product is sufficiently similar to Office 2000 in terms of the initial look and feel, that most people are going to drop into it and use it right away without a whole lot of-there's not really a big fear factor. Our expectation is that people already know about 80% of the functionality that they use on a day to day basis and could use the product with essentially no training, and that what we'll attempt to do is to focus on product enhancements that are perhaps not quite so obvious and to expose those to faculty in a way that's comfortable for them so that they can begin leveraging some of that additional functionality.
JB: Okay, let me perhaps remind our listeners that now is a good time to send in questions for our two experts and if you send your question to expert@cren.net, we'll try and take them. And with that, I'd like to come back to perhaps a topic that Mindy raised earlier with her question and to a question that we received from a Ron Nocket from Tyco Electronics. He mentions that as a large international corporation, they have multiple versions of Office running at any point in time, obviously between individuals, it sounds like. And you said that there is probably very little incompatibility problems between the various Office suites. Is there any advice that you can, in fact, provide for someone in this situation?
TS: I think that it's important to recognize, there are some small steps that you can take. For example, if you were creating a document in Office XP and the person that is going to receive the document is using Office 95, I think it's important to remember that as you're creating the document or the product because you may use a feature set or a particular feature that isn't available in Office 95. And so it's a bit incumbent on you to remember that as you're creating it, that if it is something that's going to be sent out to people who are using older applications, that you be aware of that. And then test it out. For example, when you do a file, FILE SAVE AS, use the older version and make sure. It will tell you if there are things that you've included in your document that are not compatible or will not work quite the same in an older version.
GS: I do think it's appropriate for us to inject, however, and say that to this point, I'm not aware that we've found any incompatibilities between XP and Office 2000. And I know one of our faculty members writes applications in Visual Basic that leverages the Office Suite rather heavily at the code level and Tony was telling me earlier today that he'd done some testing of that source code and so far, everything was working fine.
JB: Maybe I could come back to another question having to do with - I think, Greg, it was you that mentioned the web integration and both the benefits that that brings. But then also, I have a question of what impact is this going to have on your college environment if folks are going to be walking around with their computers and being more mobile with computing, which seems to be a trend? And then if we have the ever-increasing benefits of being on the web, how do you see that particularly playing out in your environment?
GS: Well, our site in particular is not actively supporting wireless access. I don't believe we currently have wireless access today so pretty much, that's the common denominator, the web interface. And that's really consistent with where we've been moving. Our website today is hosted entirely off our Microsoft Exchange 2000 and we've been moving more and more towards allowing both faculty and students to publish what we call Office Docs. By Office Docs, we're talking about Word, Excel, PowerPoint, so when a user wants to publish one of these documents, they simply drag it off of the desktop or the file system into an Exchange public folder and that document is exposed within an I-frame in our web page.
So the good news is that Office 2000 supports this very well. There is a couple of development features that our programmers are very excited about in terms of being able to, say, force opening a document in a new window and that does require some newer feature that's not available in the older code. But that portion works fairly well. But mostly what we tell people is as long as you're using a current browser, which for us at this point is IE, Internet Explorer 5.5, your experience will be just fine. It doesn't really matter whether you're using Office 2000 or Office XP. Those documents rendered from the website will be fine.
TS: And I think - excuse me, I was going to say, I think too, the university has put some effort into providing ports for people to plug their laptops in different areas around the campus so that students can go to the library and we are installing those kind of ports here at the college, too.
JB: Okay, so you're supporting mobility from that perspective.
GS: Yes, we are.
BM: Tony, we had a question on the web from Alan Sprague, which actually mirrors one of my own questions, which is, what is the system requirements to use Office XP in terms of memory or CPU?
TS: Well, I think it's a good question and I think I may know this person distantly. He actually is a relative of mine!
JB: Oh, well, we don't allow that!
TS: Oh, well, sorry! I think if he's asking memory as far as hard disk space, it does take up fairly significantly more hard disk space than older versions, although not a great deal more than Office 2000. As far as memory on the desktop, memory's gotten pretty cheap and we run our machines with at least 190 megs of RAM and that seems to be more than adequate for running Office. I've been, like I said, running it for quite some time and tried to put some fairly heavy pressure on it and it's been what I would say is rock solid through all of that and it's been a very good product in that regard.
BM: Is there a minimum processor speed that you think people would need to be comfortable with the functionality?
TS: I think Microsoft says on their website Pentium 100 or Pentium 200, I'm not exactly sure on that. Our lowest end machine is a Celeron 333 which I have been running Office XP on and it's been running very well on that.
JB: All right, great. You know, we had one other question come in and it echoes an earlier question as well, having to do with Access. Will Access 2000 - this is from Theresa Mahoney from RPI up in New York and she asks, actually, three questions, but we'll just focus on two. Let me give them to you and you can take each one. Have there been any changes with the Equation Editor? That's number one. And then, will Access 2000 be compatible with Access XP or are there issues with frontward and backward compatibility? It seems to be a continuing theme today.
TS: Yes, it does, and I think that that's a fair question. This person, Theresa, probably had experienced the change in Office 2000 from Office 97 required that when you opened an Access database in the newer version of 2000, it required that you ran a conversion routine on that database before you could open it and actually use it. That is not the case between Office 2000 and Office XP. You can go backwards and forwards without having to run a conversion routine. And I'm guessing that was probably what she was asking in regard to the compatibility issue. As to the Equation Editor, I've used it a little bit. I haven't seen any great differences in the Equation Editor in Office XP in comparison to Office 2000.
BM: Tony, would I be right in guessing that for files written with versions before Office 2000, that you'd have the same compatibility issues that you had bringing them up to 2000>�
TS: Yes, good question, Bob. That's right. If you bring it up in Office XP and it was created in Office 97, it will require that you run the conversion routine on it and actually convert the database before you can edit it or use it.
BM: Have you found those conversions to be fairly accurate?
TS: Yes, I have. With Office XP, I've been converting several of them. In fact, I did a very large database this morning that worked very well. I was quite impressed.
GS: And I guess I would add to that. I've been sending people files created in Office XP for the last two and a half months and nobody's ever told me that they weren't able to open the document.
JB: So they don't know necessarily that they're XP documents? Is that what you're saying?
JB: Interesting! You know what, one thing we haven't talked about at all - and yet I know that people are probably anxious to hear about it - is I understand that there's some new licensing and there's a new phrase being used in the licensing arena called "product activation changes." How does this impact the College of Business and what has your experience been here?
GS: Well, the College of Business is a little bit different in that Microsoft has us on a slightly different licensing model where we don't own the software. We essentially purchase a one-year license to use the software, so basically Microsoft has already deployed in our arena about four years ago this whole concept of software as a subscription. And quite frankly, as an IT manager, I really like this. I now no longer have to worry about keeping track of licenses. I don't have to have a file where I've got copies of all the licenses that I've purchased. That all goes away. We purchased a master copy of the software out of worldwide fulfillment distribution and from our supplier, we receive a campus activation key, so we're able to reinstall, to install that version multiple times using this one key. And it's a fairly straightforward process and virtually zero recordkeeping once you've paid your one-year license. That license entitles us to any upgrades that occur in any of the products for which we've been licensed during that year.
JB: So it is an annual subscription fee, basically.
GS: It is an annual subscription fee. The good news is for universities, it is very, very attractive.
BM: Greg, for people doing budget planning down the road, do you have an expectation that that yearly fee will be - do you know it ahead of time for future years?
GS: Microsoft made us a commitment at the time we originally signed on that the fee would never increase, I believe it was by more than ten percent. I'd have to be honest with you. The four years we've been on this program, I don't believe it's ever been increased. Moreover, there's also another little caveat that says once a number of licenses goes above a certain level, that entitles us to an additional discount and so I believe for us, it's 3,000 units. So once campus goes above 3,000 units, I think the price drops about three or four more dollars per unit. I believe currently we're paying about $40 per desktop and we only pay for faculty and staff, full time equivalents. The cost for student licenses is zero. They're free.
BM: Wow!
GS: So for institutions of education, this looks to be a pretty nice costing model.
JB: So the students, then, the license covers the students putting the Office Suite on their personal computers?
GS: The program that the university has right now entitles faculty and staff to install the software on their home systems. Now, when I say software, we're talking about the operating system, we're talking about productivity tools like Office or Office XP, we're talking about Visual Studio, we're talking about all the client access like this which is typically something a lot of people don't know about but can easily exceed the $40 cost we pay per desktop. This allows you your client license for SQL Server, for Exchange, for basically the back end application suite. Not only do you have to buy the client software, but you have to buy the client access license.
Now, for students, the program offers institutions the opportunity to purchase a student component which makes the software available to all of their students. Our campus has elected not to do that, largely because the students have voted that they don't want to do it, for reasons I don't fully understand. But that is a model that is available in the program. It's just that our campus has not currently participating for the students. And Tony knows a little bit more about that, if you want to pursue that.
JB: Tony, did you want to comment on that?
TS: No, I think Greg's covered it fairly well. You know, the students here at the College of Business, I think, are more the advocates for having that license opportunity than some of the other colleges on campus.
JB: Okay, I think when we were talking about this in the prep session that you mentioned that the new suite has some advanced capabilities in for use in a lab setting. Would you like to talk about those just a little bit?
TS: Well, I think what I was referring to was the collaboration features that they're including in the newer Office packages and especially in Office XP. They've significantly enhanced the collaboration features with regard to document. A lot of the faculty here do a lot of group work with students where they are asked to complete a particular project and provide a singular document as the output for that group work. And the functionality of both public folders within the Exchange opportunity as well as the collaboration features that are part of Office XP make it very, very easy to do and several of the students have been pretty excited about trying that out and seeing if it will work. And we've found it to be fairly effective.
JB: Okay, well, thank you. Let me just remind folks again, we've got time. Coming up close to the end, but we do have time for a few more questions so just go ahead and send them in to expert@cren.net. And Bob, did you get the question from Ray Drake?
BM: Yes, I did.
JB: Why don't you go ahead and let's take that one.
BM: It is yet another compatibility question.
BM: Ray Drake at East Carolina University asks about, we've talked about the interaction with Office 97 and 2000. Do you have any experience moving files between your systems and Mac Office 98 or Office 2001?
GS: The short answer to that is no, we really don't. Here at the College of Business, we don't have any Macs and it doesn't seem to fit into the business sort of environment that we provide here, so we haven't really had a chance to test it and to try it out on a Mac system.
JB: You haven't heard anything about it from anyone else then either?
GS: No, I haven't really. No.
JB: Okay. Well, maybe if anyone has out there, they can make a comment about it.
BM: That might be good.
JB: Okay. Let's see, how are we doing here? Any follow-up questions, perhaps maybe some advice on the licensing issues as far as the product activation plans or implementation program?
GS: I'm not quite sure what it is you're looking for. Microsoft has indicated that more and more, they're going to move toward a product activation key which I interpret to be an attempt on their part to get their arms around this issue of software piracy or people who are perhaps playing a little bit fast and loose with the licensing. We have seen earlier versions of the installation where you could only install the product a couple of times and essentially beyond that, it wouldn't install. And the impression we have is as you do the installation, it's recording a key with some machine-specific information on it that allows it to identify that particular system. And my understanding is that they're going to allow two installations plus, I believe, a backup, at least at the consumer level.
If you're talking about universities or people who have corporate licensing programs, different versions of a product - and I say different versions, not in terms of functionality, but in terms of licensing - are going to be available, will allow a single activation key available for that entire institution which then ties that institution in terms of to whom it belongs so that if that key and that version appeared on some other site, they'd be able to trace it back as belonging to Company A or School B. I just think that's part of their attempt to get their hands on some of the software licensing issues.
JB: Okay, well, it is always a challenge to, in fact, manage that.
GS: I think people are often frustrated about it because they perceive it's an extra step and some extra hoops, but I think most of the people I talk to want to do the right thing and I think most IT managers with whom I interact want to make sure that they're legal. And I have to tell you that this has really been kind of a no-brainer for me with the agreement that we currently have in place. All these issues in terms of tracking, how many copies of this application or that application I have, being able to retrieve those in the event we're audited essentially have all evaporated so I think not only does it sort of lift a cloud from my mind, it also simplifies the recordkeeping. I don't have to spend time keeping track of the Microsoft stuff, anyway, like I used to have to.
BM: Now, Greg, you've expressed that you're very happy with the subscription model but that's just one of the possible offerings. Schools can certainly go ahead and do traditional purchases?
GS: That is true. A school can still have the option of doing the more traditional purchase.
JB: Okay, it sounds like you're really very, very positive about your experience with this. What do you think about the other campuses and do you have any reservations that would cause you to say, "Wait a minute, why don't you hold back before wholesale upgrading"? Or would you suggest, "Let's just rush and deploy this"?
GS: Well, I guess I would answer that this way. My philosophy is that schools are in the business of educating people, in our case, mostly young people. And I think to the extent that we, as an institution of learning, afford our students access to current technology. We're doing them a service. I think our students are at an advantage when they're out in the market, competing for jobs with students from other institutions that are not actively embracing early deployment of new technology.
So to me, I like the subscription model because it eliminates the issue of, "Well, gee, did I budget money for that?" Now we don't think about it, we just decide we're going to do it, it's just a matter of tactically determining what's the opportune time for us to push this new software out to our users. And that affords our students and our faculty early access to the technology. And the feedback that we get from employers, especially in the Portland area, the Portland business community, is they tend to prefer our students because our students tend to come with more current and more advanced technology skills. So I would say, to the extent that your institution views that as an important selling point for your graduates, then perhaps you should be-�
JB: I think that's a really good point. I was wondering whether, in terms of support issues or anything else, would there be any reason for that to hold back or whether, you know, you would recommend to folks just to move forward with it.
TS: I'll answer on the support side of it. I think that from my perspective, support gets a little bit easier as we go through some of these upgrades for the very reason that I'd say Microsoft is learning some tricks of the trade as they go. You can see by many of the questions regarding compatibility, Microsoft's tried to learn from their mistakes of the past and tried to rectify some of those things. And that in itself has created some less work as far as my support. I think the other thing, too, is that I've noticed that this version of Office XP I'm speaking of is more stable. It requires less time from me to run out and try and fix something or rescue somebody who's gotten themselves into a pickle or is frozen up or something. I don't see that as much happening.
GS: We really noted that in the Windows 2000 deployment. Once we completed that - it was January, February - Tony and I were talking. Just how much has our support workload declined? And the short answer is, I think, it was about 35%, just sort of a thumbnail sense of the change in the number of calls.
JB: Wow, that would be truly significant! We do have a couple of final questions that came in real quickly. Bob, do you want to take one or two of them here?
BM: Actually, we've got a multi-stage question from the University of Portland, actually. I think the first question, the first part of this, we've touched on some. Would the retraining costs of bringing people from Office 97 to Office XP be easier, perhaps, for those who have waited than it would have been going from Office 97 to 2000?
GS: Well, you skip a step, obviously. You don't have to do it twice. But I think that the learning curve is not too steep in either of the upgrades, but going from Office 97 to Office 2000, you certainly would want to provide training so that people can get the best use out of it. People who are using 97 would get along fine. They just might not be able to notice some of the features and be able to make use of them if they didn't have some training.
TS: It took people a little while to discover the right mouse click, things like that.
BM: Little number questions for Greg. The license price increase, the promise not to be more than ten percent, is that per annum? Or is that overall from the beginning?
GS: I would have to go back and check my records, but I believe it was in any given year, not more than ten percent. That would be per annum.
BM: And for the free student license cost, does this allow you to install into student labs?
GS: That's correct. The software in our student labs essentially is zero cost for the software.
BM: Okay.
JB: And then the one other question that came in, let's see. Jeff Burdell from RPI asked a question, again about licensing. Are you all licensed under Campus Agreement version 2.0?
GS: It is Campus Agreement. I'm not sure of the version number. It's a license we signed, I think we signed our Campus Agreement in November. I'm not privy to the actual document. That's handled through the Purchasing group.
JB: All right, and then one other quick follow-up question from Jeff is are you issued different keys from Microsoft for the different products or is it one universal key?
GS: One universal key for Office.
JB: All right, great! Let me see. Did we get them? Bob, do we have any others that we missed here?
BM: I think we've gotten pretty close. Most of our questions asked.
JB: Great! Well, listen, we're coming up to or are very close to the end here. Bob, do you have any final question or comment that you'd like to ask our experts?
BM: I'm just verifying. I think I know the answer, but I would assume that you would all encourage other campuses to take this path, particularly the subscription model? You seem very happy about this.
GS: I certainly would. Our experience has been quite favorable. Tony and I were talking a couple of days ago. In the early days, when we did the Office 95, the Office 97 and people were sort of putting us off and it was really a hard sell. Then we did the upgrade to Windows 2000 and that went very, very smoothly. And now Tony tells me he's actually got people knocking on the door, queuing up, saying, "I want to go next!"
JB: "I'm ready," huh?
GS: Yeah. So we're seeing, in terms of end user behavior, quite a change from "Over my dead body!" or "Maybe not 'til the end of the summer" to the point where they're now telling us, "Well, we want these new features and we want this new functionality and I saw so-and-so using this and that looks really cool! I'd like to get it, too. How soon can you do me?"
JB: All right, great. Any other final comment from Greg or Tony before we finish up here?
TS: I think it's important to note that people need to do their homework whenever you talk about doing an upgrade. You know, people ask about the pitfalls of it, and I think the key is to get your key people trained on the product and understand it fully and then choose your implementation method and do it in a thoughtful, productive way. And then support the users as you do so. We've made a commitment to provide as much support as we can to the end users so that these kinds of upgrades go with a minimal amount of stress and pain, if you will, and I think that that's really important, to remember the users when you do that and as you upgrade in any product. And I think with XP, it's a significant enough upgrade and change that it is important to provide a level of support after the fact.
JB: All right, well, with that, it's a thoughtful reminder that while an upgrade brings new features, it still does need to be done thoughtfully.
JB: So with that, it's time for our closing notes and I'd like to say, for those questions that we didn't get to, we'll send them to our experts and we'll try and take some of those offline. Can't believe it's true, but this is our last Tech Talk until we resume them in the fall, on September 20th so be sure, as you're going about the work you're doing this summer, to send us notes about experts and topics that you'd like to hear on Tech Talks.
Many thanks to our CREN member institutions and to Microsoft for their sponsorship of today's session. A special thanks to our Tech Talk experts for today, Greg Scott and Tony Saxman; to our guest technology anchor, Bob Mahoney-you did great, thanks!-To Terry Calhoun, Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network: to Susie Berneis-I'm losing my breath!-audio file transcriber; and finally a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, Tony. Bye, Greg.
GS: Bye.
TS: Goodbye.
JB: Thank you, Bob. Take care. See you all on September 20th to our audience. Take care!
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