Upgrading to Office 2007

I’ve recently gone through an upgrade at work to Office 2007. This is obviously a pretty big change for our users (as you’ve probably seen, the interface is totally different), and we’ve heard our fair share of “feedback”. In the end, though, it was decided at the top we were going to upgrade so that’s what we did. Having gone through the process, I thought I’d share some some thoughts here on how to make the upgrade go smoothly. If you’re thinking that Office is junk and everyone should just use open source (I do use Open Office at home), you might want to stop reading here, because that really isn’t relevant to this post.  Anyhow, here is what I’ve found:

1. Don’t just upgrade to Office on the weekend without notifying any of your users about the switch. People got to work on Monday morning expecting to do their jobs, and were met with an entirely new Office interface. Yes, this really happened.
2. Have a few pilot or beta users test the software. Pick a nice mix of users that use each piece of software in the Office suite. Make sure you choose “power users” as well as people who just use the basics of the software. This should generate a representative sample of questions as well as test any code that might break.
3. Schedule a training session with your users before they are upgraded to just go over some of the basics of the software.  If you are completely new to Office 2007 it’s not immediately evident how to, for example, save a document in Word.  The entire File menu is hidden. The more information people have before you upgrade the less problems you will have and the happier everyone will be.
4. Finally, be ready for questions, comments, and complaints.  As with any change, you will have those who insist things were better the old way.  Just be ready for this and help them work through it.

These are just a few things I’ve noticed from our Office upgrade.  I’m sure there are other tips out there and if any of you have any tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post.