Hello everyone,

Our organization is currently using Office 2003 standard but is looking to upgrade to 2007 within the next year.

We have about 500, generally novice, office users that would need to be brought up to speed on the new system. Regarding available resources, I am the only tech trainer and we have one computer lab with 12 systems.

I'm curious to know your opinions regarding ways to approach this process... As you can see, I'm stretched pretty thin as is, and this seems like a daunting process. Any ideas/suggestions/similar experiences/etc.?

Thanks in advance!
-Ed

We will be upgrading to Office 2007 sometime this summer. We have about 2x the employees, same basic demographic regarding skill level, and no dedicated "technical" trainer-- although we have a staff that trains our proprietary/operations curriculum, mostly new hires.

We are going to focus our instructional design and training resources on training Managers to better leverage SharePoint, which we use as our Intranet. We'll teach them to use Team Sites, My Site, and about managing workspaces and documents, etc. Right now IT manages the main site, and a few teams use team sites.

For the other office products, we do not plan to do much training at all. We are creating a self-service menu that links to the Microsoft site to specific training lessons, job aids, etc. The Microsoft site tends to be quite chaotic, IMHO, and it's hard for users to find specific things if they haven't used the site much. So we are doing that work for them-- our in-house menu will be organized by topic and then they can click directly into a lesson, job aid, etc.

If you haven't already discovered it (it's buried pretty deep) the Microsoft site has a great "converter" tool that lets you click a command in a Flash simulation of 2003 and it will then show you how to find that command in 2007. It's available for all the Office packages. So, we will prominently display these links so people can self-serve.

Here's the Word tool:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100744321033.aspx

Click on "Start The Guide"

I'm always surprised how many people still don't know the fundamentals of word and powerpoint. They still use them like a typewriter. This happens because people focus on teaching the features and not how people should be using these tools on the job.

Here's a quick test if people understand the fundamentals of Word.

1. Can you create a style?
2. Can you center or indent something without spacing over?
3. Can you generate a table of contents?

Thanks Amy_L for the Microsoft flash resource! It’s definitely a great support tool that can supplement, or possibly replace, training for some of our staff. I’d be curious to see a screenshot of your self-service window/menu if you’re willing to share it. As much as I wish that we could steer our employees to existing MS resources, I know from previous experience that our staff will need more hand-holding.

Learning Path Consultants (sorry, I don’t know your actual name!), I agree 100% that most software manufacturers focus on features over usability. Any time a new release of software comes out, most marketing collateral refers to the addition of new features and pays only lip service to ease of use. There is a great book called The Inmates are Runnning the Asylum which fleshes this out in great detail. It’s a great read for anyone, especially for IT apologists who feel that features are the most important part of software design and usability comes second.

quote:

Originally posted by Ed MacD:
Thanks Amy_L for the Microsoft flash resource! It’s definitely a great support tool that can supplement, or possibly replace, training for some of our staff. I’d be curious to see a screenshot of your self-service window/menu if you’re willing to share it.

Well, we have actually created an interactive Flash tool that is basically a glorified PowerPoint with lots of hyperlinks-- we used Captivate.

The employee can go into different "Classrooms" and we then have a listing of the courses, training, job aids, etc, and then if they click on the title it links them to that course on the MS website. Sorry, I can't realy post what it looks like.

We are placing the Flash file on SharePoint as web part.

If you use SharePoint, you can just create a Microsoft Team Site and then create a list of links, no need to be fancy. Whatever your intranet, just create a page for Microsoft Training and then create "hyperlink heaven". The key is to be organized so they don't get discouraged.

quote:

Originally posted by Ed MacD:
As much as I wish that we could steer our employees to existing MS resources, I know from previous experience that our staff will need more hand-holding.

Well, our organization doesn't tend towards self-reliance either. But, we are presenting it as "here it is". We just do not have resources to do "training", plus we aren't convinced people need "training".... it's really more performance support at the point they are trying to do XYZ in the application, which is why we are pointing them to the Converter Tool.

quote:

Learning Path Consultants (sorry, I don’t know your actual name!), I agree 100% that most software manufacturers focus on features over usability. Any time a new release of software comes out, most marketing collateral refers to the addition of new features and pays only lip service to ease of use.

This is why we are also including self-guided learning opportunities from the Microsoft At Work site, for example Stephanie Krieger's excellent webcast 12 Tips For Creating Better Documents.

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getworkdone/documents.mspx

This stuff is already out there-- we are just not going to reinvent the wheel.