Help me become a Vista and Office 2007 pro!

November 14, 2006 8:28 PM

Help me become a Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 pro!

Are there any well-done, professional, in-depth screencast tutorials (in the vein of Lynda.com) over being a Windows Vista power user?

Same question for Office 2007?

Free or for pay services welcome.

Side question: How long does it usually take Lynda.com to come out with tutorials once a product is released?

Follow-up question: approximately when will most Fortune 500-type companies make the switch to Vista? How about Office 2007?

posted by JPowers to technology (5 comments total)

Re: followup.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:57 PM on November 14, 2006

Lynda.com and most other training services are geared towards consumers, who won't get Vista until January 2007.

Regarding adoption, I bet its going to be at least a year before large corporations start adopting either of them.
posted by mphuie at 9:38 PM on November 14, 2006

Follow-up question: approximately when will most Fortune 500-type companies make the switch to Vista?

Put it this way, Microsoft has committed to backing XP with "mainstream" support until April 14, 2009, and with security updates and "extended support" until April, 2011. They calculate all of this based on what their customers tell them they want, which means that they had a whole bunch of Fortune 500 IT people telling them that they want XP supported for at least another 3 to 5 years. In other words, corporate IT people want long lifetimes and are extremely slow to migrate to new operating systems. I would say the very first, bleeding edge corporate IT organizations will start the process of planning for an upgrade in the next year or two. Large IT departments have huge amounts of systems to consider and any kind of upgrade takes immense amounts of planning, they can't just go pop in an upgrade DVD to the secretary's PC.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:03 PM on November 14, 2006

Fortune 500 rollout of Vista is probably 2008 at the earliest. They will wait for the first service pack, plus there is the need to test intranet applications. They certainly weren't in any hurry with XP.
posted by smackfu at 10:05 PM on November 14, 2006

Rhomboid writes "They calculate all of this based on what their customers tell them they want, which means that they had a whole bunch of Fortune 500 IT people telling them that they want XP supported for at least another 3 to 5 years."


Microsoft has always supported OSs until they are two versions out of date. One of the things driving the push to launch Vista, even though they've had to strip all the stuff that makes it worth upgrading, is the day it ships they can cease all but "critical" support for W2K.
posted by Mitheral at 10:03 AM on November 15, 2006