Vista preparedness at Indiana University

In June of 2006 the Director for User Support at Indiana University (IU) issued a mandate stating that the organization should begin to prepare the support infrastructure for the release of Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. The goal: to ensure staff was trained and documentation in place to manage what could be a huge load on user support resources. A 'Vista/Office 2007 Readiness Team' was assembled. The team consisted of members from across the University Information Technology Services organization; experts in the areas of Frontline Support, Knowledge Management, Messaging, Security, Student Technology Centers, Residential IT Services, Local Support Provider Services and User Communications. With access to beta versions of Vista and Office, the team was able to do extensive testing of the products and identify potential problems. User communications was an essential element of the Vista/Office 2007 Readiness project. While the various technology experts shared insights regarding technical problems the User Communications and Knowledge Management teams were there to take that information, distill it into a form readily digested by the average user and then construct a plan to communicate this information to the users. The group's experience proved that educating a user community about high profile IT issues is best done in an environment in which information is shared across relevant segments of the IT organization. It is assumed that this model will work for future large scale implementations at Indiana University.