This is a modified excerpt of an email that I sent to a student at WOU about why we do not currently use Office 2007.
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There are a few issues at hand here, so I’ll try to cover each. To begin, we actually purchases license of Office 2007 with new computers as we buy them (so we can migrate when its time). That’s progress, but we have quite a few older machines that haven’t been replaced lately and so don’t have 2007 licenses. To purchase office 2007 for every computer/terminal server would place us in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars arena. From a management/support perspective, we are simply unwilling (and unable from a staffing perspective) to partially deploy 2007.
Supporting two versions of the software (with users not knowing which they are using) is a nightmare. So, logically, when we move to Office 2007, we’ll migrate the entire campus at once. When that day comes, we will have to time the change in such a way as to allow training for campus members.
Students (not the mention faculty and staff) would be presented with a VERY NEW interface that honestly takes time to get used to. Macros, 3rd party integration apps and customizations would be lost and need to be supported by UCS. This is honestly hundreds of man hours for a full migration and support. Finally, some features of 2007 were meant to be instituted simultaneously with Vista (which is recommended). As we have no intent up migrating to Vista in the near future, upgrading 2007 has not been a priroity. We were also warned by articles like this one:
http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid192_gci1232198,00.html
This type of information (which we received from many sources) does not encourage us to migrate to 2007 quickly. The migration will take some real time, thought and planning. The good news is that yesterday I saw an email about the planning process that would define how and when to roll out Office 2007 to campus, so the process has begun.
I believe that most 2007 versions allow you to save your project to an older version (although some newer, advanced functionality may be lost) so that campus (and most of the world) can properly view them. In this case we had to choose between upgrading for the minority of power users (like yourself) or maintaining a level we could support for the majority of students, faculty and staff.
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