IT Services
News - January 30, 2007

IT UPDATE ON WINDOWS VISTA AND MICROSOFT OFFICE

Windows Vista: As you may know, Microsoft is releasing a new version of Windows, named Vista, to home computer users this week. Vista contains upgrades to some of the underlying functionality of the Windows XP operating system that the majority of faculty and staff use on computers provided by the college. Many corporate and higher educational users are taking a wait and see approach to Vista until vendor support and other technical issues are ironed out this year. The Information Technology (IT) department has begun initial testing of Vista but it is clear that we will not be able to support Vista on college-owned computers for some time, due to incompatibilities with critical software applications such as Banner and Novell. We will continue to monitor Vista developments and other software application upgrades throughout the year, but it is unlikely that we will officially support Vista for on-campus use before January 2008.

Microsoft Office 2007: You will also begin hearing that Microsoft has released an upgrade to the Windows version of the Office application suite (Word, Excel, Access). IT has just received these updates and we are currently licensed to upgrade all LCC owned computers. However, there is one fairly large hurdle: Office 2007 has new default file formats which will require translation to use with older versions of Office. It is anticipated that we will officially support this version in computer labs and on faculty/staff computers, probably before the fall term, once we have tested them fully.

Please call 463-4444 or write the IT Helpdesk at helpdesk@lanecc.edu with any questions. Submitted by Todd Lutz, Manager, Technology Support Services.