Good points. With 5000+ Office users, you will surely have some needing help. Do check out the VTC stuff.

It is interesting to me that the people with IT experience did not have trouble while those heavily into office activities did. I do suppose it depends on what features of the products one uses as to how different the 2007 versions are, beyond the UI, of course.

We transitioned from 2003 to 2007 within the last year, and here's what we did:

We created a SharePoint site with all our training links and documents.

IT installed the Get Started Ribbon into Office 2007 so everyone had access to the Interactive Guide and other training resources.

What you do with the interactive guide is enter what you used to do in 2003 and it shows you how to do it in 2007. It's a very nice tool.

We created a short CBT that introduced the new terminology and new look and feel. We pointed out the features new to 2007 like Smart Art. We covered the Get Started tab in depth and showed people how to help themselves via the Get Started and Help menus. We focused on preparing people to help themselves.

We did not do any training with people in classroom settings.

We loaded some free job aids I found on the internet to our SharePoint site:

http://www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm

We went through all the Office tutorials on the Microsoft website and we created a logical order for people to go through them (on the MS site they are not in a logical order, they are ranked by users with "stars"... not very convenient for someone who wants to go from the beginning). So, we did the legwork of going through the tutorials, putting them in an logical order, and then we posted them on our SharePoint site, in order, so all the person had to do was click on our link and go straight to that tutorial... no fishing around in the MS site which is a big rabbit hole.

We didn't have any complaints, any problems, or any issues. Everyone did the CBT, used the Get Started tab, and used the self-help we provided.

It went very smoothly.

Amy -
Hurray! What an accomplishment to find the best MS tutorials. Would you be willing to share the list of the ones you found to be best?
- Anne
www.hullstrategies.com
anne@hullstrategies.com