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Well, we were just OK'd to purchase and roll out office 2010 across the company. We have roughly 400 people who will be receiving this. We're upgrading from a myriad of installs (mostly office 2000 with Outlook 2003, some people have office 03, some have 07, some have 2010 already).
What options do we have to make this roll out as easy as possible for us and our users? We will probably be using a KMS server for the keys if it is a possibility.
You have 400 user seats and don't already have some kind of managed desktop or application deployment infrastructure already in place? I'm very far removed from that function at my job, and actually don't have to participate in it, because anyone in R&D is exempt here, but I always thought that once you go beyond a few dozen users, it was worth going to some kind of centrally managed solution to save on support costs. I think our company uses Microsoft SMS, or whatever replaced it.
You have 400 user seats and don't already have some kind of managed desktop or application deployment infrastructure already in place? I'm very far removed from that function at my job, and actually don't have to participate in it, because anyone in R&D is exempt here, but I always thought that once you go beyond a few dozen users, it was worth going to some kind of centrally managed solution to save on support costs. I think our company uses Microsoft SMS, or whatever replaced it.
Well, we are going to go the KMS route (one key to rule them all, so to speak) but that doesn't include any server-side pushes of software or anything like that.
We have no managed system already set up. The company blew up in size fairly quickly and the big guys up stairs never wanted to cough up the change to get the correct systems in place. We have managed clients for antivirus, and we have managed keys for Windows, but nothing for applications.
We're hoping that from this point forward (we're doing a massive overhaul of our servers, including VM servers and all that kind of thing) we will be much more organized, but at the moment, it's all hodgepodge.
Look into SCCM or a 3rd party management tool like Symantec's Altiris product. This is actually more for overall management of your environment, not just for this particular task. At 400 nodes (and whatever number of servers, network devices you have), its time to think about a centralized tool. They aren't cheap and does take some effort to implement/maintain... but the investment is well worth the efficiency, resource savings, as well as providing better service (workstation rebuilds, application pushes, inventory, patch management, change management etc.).
Also - I completely agree with Tek on making sure you (as well as the users) understand the impact of this change. 2007 to 2010 isn't a huge deal. But anything before that to 2010 can be daunting to some users.
We did a survey, put some budget for training, and did a pilot test. The pilot test actually revealed that some critical business processes were relying on macros that were created in Office v3. These worked on Office 2003 - but not past that. So they actually had to be rewritten....lucky we had some real old timers there.
Also - I completely agree with Tek on making sure you (as well as the users) understand the impact of this change. 2007 to 2010 isn't a huge deal. But anything before that to 2010 can be daunting to some users.
That's the big thing at my office. I am the IT Manager. I told my bosses I would NOT roll out 2010 (from our current 2003) unless they allowed me to get a professional trainer in here.
The learning curve is steep.
Yep, we've been through that loop. We finally got them to agree that they needed training.
I found out today that we're doing this departmentally, so it won't be a full roll-out like we were originally thinking. Although it will take much longer, I think it will minimize hassle and fuss.
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