Susanne Dansey’s Blog

Has anyone been overwhelmed with the coverage of Microsoft Windows Vista or the 2007 Microsoft Office system?

I notice them on retail websites and of course through internal partner communication but since the commercial Vista launch at the end of January I haven’t seen enough activity to hear people rushing for it…

David has posted recently a request to the community asking for feedback about specific issues in both application suites which may be preventing us holding us back on recommending the products. Responses from partners so far have included:

“We are experiencing the same sort of resistance in many cases to the new technology - it is a time issue - it seems most of the UK are very busy just doing business at this time of year!”

“the single issue I’ve got… is the use of Office 2007 native files with SharePoint Services v2 running in an SBS 2003 environment. Whilst we can change the MIME type in IIS and upload the Office gif files for the icons etc, I don’t believe that docx is a native/supported content type in WSS v2… I guess that this isn’t a bug but an unsupoprted feature!”

If you are coming up against show stoppers that are getting in the way of you selling or even adopting Vista or ‘Office 2007′ then get in contact with David and let him know. He is on a mission to get a better level of adoption within the small business market via partners and needs your feedback to help him achieve this.

Personally speaking, the way I am generating interest in these new applications is to ’show and tell’ and that takes time; time to understand the products yourself, time to know what interests me about the products, time to know what will excite them, and time to demonstrate it.

We have had our fair share of obstacles here ourselves (dirty shutdowns, slow indexing within Outlook, RSS feed problems etc…) but are using the Microsoft teams to iron out any problems we have. We’ve noticed that different machines are getting different issues (some v. interesting) and we wouldn’t want our clients to go through the same. After justifying the investment in new software and ‘tin’, you don’t want to take them two steps back after taking one forward.

On the whole, our clients who have been running 2007 Microsoft Office System and Windows Vista are very happy with the products. But if it wasn’t for us as an informed and experienced partner with a strong relationship with Microsoft, they’d still be using the same functions they did in Office 2003 & Vista (or even ‘98!).

Plesae send anything you wish to add to David (contact him via his website if you don’t have his email). If he doesn’t get a list of problems that need fixing then Microsoft will continue to presume that there are none. (This bypasses any standard call logging or traditional support processes that you may have experienced before.)