Office 2007 Training Materials
As we move forward toward making the move from 2k3 to 2k7 Jason has tasked me with finding some training materials. A quick Google search found tons of hits for it. However most of it I’d have to pay for and I’m a bigger fan of free than I am of paying for things… I’m weird I guess. So I found stuff on M$’s site that looked promising. Like 14 .wmv files teaching you about the new features in 2k7. “Hey!”, he said ignorantly “These are made by Microsoft! They’ve gotta be great!” so he downloaded 4 of them and started watching them.
Awesome they were not:
- Powerpoint presentations with a guy with a thick hispanic accent narrating in the background.
- VERY BORING
- He demo’s 2k7 with a BETA 2 RELEASE. Not the full release, not even an RC. a BETA 2.
- Did I mention it was boring?
Luckily I have 2 monitors, so I was able to put it to the side and listen for a while while I did other things. I knew it probably wouldn’t work entirely for our needs, but at least I should be able to get a feel for what M$ thinks is important… then he said he was showing us a beta release. (For those of you who didn’t follow the release path much for 2k7 there were HUGE changes between beta and RC and they even did a “Technical Refresh” of the RC (that means they made RC2 but didn’t want to call it RC2). If they’re not even gonna demo the thing on an active version of Office, I’m not using it.
When I was at ND, some of us in OIT went to Signal Learning (a local IT training place) to see what they were doing for Vista training. We showed up and sat down in a room that was boiling hot that had an industrial size fan in it to cool it, Machines with poor specs running a beta version of Vista in a Virtual Machine. This was AFTER vista was released to the public. I’d been running the full version for about a month on my machine and they still had it in a VM.
“Why the rant Kyle? What’s your friggin beef?”
It all comes back to Bill and Ted “Be Excellent to each other.” If you’re gonna put something out there and claim to be experts on it. You BETTER present it WELL. Don’t waste my time with excuses about infrastructure… I want a product and I want a GOOD product. It’s a consumer society - if you won’t do it well, someone else will.
/End Rant
That last bit applies to your church as well. If you’re in IT you are a HUGE part of the infrastructure. Make your infrastructure excellent so that people don’t get blocked from something great.
