UK Education Agency Report: Don’t Upgrade to Vista, Office 2007

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has completed its report (.PDF) on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, and the conclusions it reached shouldn’t surprise critics of Windows Vista and Office 2007.

In January 2006, Becta announced that it would conduct a review of Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Office 2007 products. In January 2007 Becta published an interim report which concluded
early deployment of Vista wasn’t justified based on the costs and unclear benefits, and Office 2007 had no “must have” features.

Notably, that interim report also recommended that

educational Information and Communications Technology (ICT) suppliers should ship computers for the educational marketplace with a choice of office productivity suites on the desktop. Ideally, this choice should include an open-source offering

This new report is Becta’s final report. The key recommendations from the report are:

Upgrading existing ICT systems to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 is not recommended and mixed Windows-based operating environments should be avoided. However, Vista should be considered where new institution-wide ICT provision is being planned.

In other words, don’t upgrade older systems to Vista. Don’t mix Vista and XP. (which, since you shouldn’t be upgrading any systems anyway, should be easy). If you are looking into an update of all computers for an entire school, consider Vista then, and only then.

No widespread deployment of Office 2007 should take place until schools and colleges are sure that they have in place mechanisms to deal with interoperability and potential digital divide issues set out in the report.

To ensure widest compatibility of files between different applications, users of Office 2007 should not save in Microsoft’s new Office format (OOXML).

Due to limitations in Microsoft’s implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) international standard, users should in the short term continue to save files in the more widely adopted .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.

Most users I know who are using Office are using the older formats, to make sure they are compatible with say, Office 2003. In fact, I know few people using the new format - unless someone happens to send them a document in one of those formats and they have to open it.

Pupils, teachers and parents should also be made aware of the wide range of free-to-use products currently available and on how to use and access them.

The ICT industry should be facilitating easier access to ‘free-to-use’ office productivity software.

They are, of course, talking about open-source alternatives such as OpenOffice.

The report also notes the following, which would be applauded by those in the “Vista-capable lawsuit.”

While an estimated 66% of machines in the school ICT estate are “Vista capable” (as defined by Microsoft), only an estimated 22% of machines meet the specification necessary to run Vista effectively

At the same time Becta figures the upgrade cost at about £125 / PC for primary schools and £75 / PC for secondary schools. It estimated the cost of all of the machines in England and Wales to be £175 million, a third of which would be licensing costs. Finally, Becta says “there remains a perceived lack of significant business benefit delivered by the new features in Vista to balance out the costs associated with its deployment.”

While Becta focused on costs, ability of PCs to run Vista, and questionable benefits for Vista, it mostly focused on interoperability questions with Office 2007, as well as limitations in ODF support.

While Vista has worked fine for me, it should be noted that I have Vista running on two brand-new machines and on one older, but when purchased, top-of-the-line machine. So horsepower hasn’t been an issue. Compatibility with software and drivers: that’s been an issue.

And don’t get me started on Office 2007. The ribbon alone is enough to drive me insane.

I’m sure Microsoft won’t be happy about this report, and it most likely will serve as additional (as if they needed more) impetus to get Vista SP1 out sooner.