[OPLINTECH] [OPLINLIST] Office 2007 on public workstations?

[Mann, James H.]

GCPL put out Office 2007 for the public in July. Also on new computers (to take advantage of the XP downgrade solution). No real problems. But, we brought in a trainer from the Vocational school to train staff so they could answer questions from the public.
Open Office would have been my first choice since there is less of a learning curve but IMHO no one seems ready to jump on the FOSS bandwagon just yet.
Also, we had previously installed the Office 07 converter since we had so many issues with patrons bringing in 07 documents.
My theory, which seems to be holding true, is that if you have such a big demand from patrons to open 07 documents they are creating at home or school than there is no big learning curve for patrons when you upgrade.
Memory keeps getting cheaper and we're trying to get staff to 2gigs and the public 1gig which seems to resolve most issues with running multiple applications.

Have a safe holiday and a great New year!

Jim

________________________________________
From: oplinlist-bounces at oplin.org [oplinlist-bounces at oplin.org] On Behalf Of Nick Kelley [nkelley at lkwdpl.org]
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 3:28 PM
To: Craig Heaton
Cc: OPLINTECH; oplinlist at oplin.org
Subject: Re: [OPLINLIST] Office 2007 on public workstations?

Hi Craig,

We have been using Office 2007 for the past 6 months. We had to make some modifications to make the default file type compatible with older Office versions and we have had to train staff and public on some of the differences but everyone seems to be adjusting. Also, we are lucky we purchased new computers recently so the RAM issue hasn't been a problem. If you can add more memory that would probably fix that problem.

Nick

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Craig Heaton <heatoncr at oplin.org<mailto:heatoncr at oplin.org>> wrote:
Hello,
I'm wondering how many library systems are offering Microsoft Office 2007 on
their public workstations?  If you aren't, what alternatives do you offer?
An older version of Office?  A version of OpenOffice?

We are considering installing it onto the public workstations, but I'm
reluctant to do so as it has been problematic for us on the staff
workstations (resoure hog which requires us to increase installed base of
RAM, interactions with our catalog software and other Java based apps,
corruption of data tables, etc.).

Craig Heaton
System Administrator
Clermont County Public Library
heatoncr at oplin.org<mailto:heatoncr at oplin.org>

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--
Nicholas Kelley
Lakewood Public Library
Electronic Services, Supervisor
216-226-8275, ext. 174