On Tue, 2002-10-15 at 09:15, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
I realize that it's probably not a big deal to re-do the offending documents in OOo, so that they would survive round-trips unscathed, but this is a selling job, as much as anything. It's difficult to persuade users in Finance or Engineering that they should abandon MS Office when it means they'd need to re-author many of their existing documents. We want to minimize the resentment when it comes time for the big change.
That's funny, because in my former life as an engineer, I always resented having to redo work that I lost when MS Office crapped on me and locked up the computer....
I think that was assumed (by our IT crew). To succeed with their own selling job, they need to provide our troops with the productivity features of Outlook/Exchange-server -- the shared access to everybody's calendars, the meeting-scheduling and resource-scheduling, the voting and notification, that ties in so smoothly with e-mail.
What's with this "voting" garbage in Outlook/Exchange anyway? It's a business. Votes are cast by the board of directors, not the employees. If your employees are running office polls, somebody's not doing work. (Sorry, that's a whole seperate soap box. I'll get down now.)
In other words, the users don't care about the underlying reasons for a change. They just want to keep working with minimal disruption. So, anything that looked like they were losing useful functionality would be less than attractive.
That's a lark. They resist change. They don't care about productivity. They wouldn't know productivity if it came in the form of a pit bull terrier and locked itself on thier ankle. They're just scared that they'll actually have to learn something. (Oops. there's that soap box again. No wonder I work for myself!) Jody Harris -- Realization Systems, Inc. http://www.realizationsystems.com/