On my way home from a recent business trip, I made a stop for a coffee. As I sat down a businessman at the next table caught my attention. His entire body language was screaming in frustration, and he appeared to be very close to pouring his entire freshly brewed, steaming hot Grande Triple Shot Cappuccino over his laptop.
Just a few days ago his laptop was upgraded to the new Windows 7 OS. He really liked the look and feel of this new operating system. His laptop was faster and there was a lot of new great stuff in there. Unfortunately, his tools and applications were not really working anymore.
He told me that his day had turned into a complete disaster. It all started just before lunch when a colleague called to check if he was ready for their joint meeting with a new prospect. He had totally forgotten about the appointment, and this had never happened before. He would always get a reminder on both his computer and cell phone 1 hour and 45 minutes prior to any bookings put into his calendar. Because of his busy workdays he was totally dependent on these alerts, and one of the IT guys had once showed him how to personalize his Outlook application to always generate these default reminders at exactly 1.75 hours prior to the event. But after he got Win7 on his computer, none of his new appointments worked this way anymore.
This was only the beginning of his nightmarish day. Already late, he rushed to his cubicle, logged onto his laptop and pulled up the business proposal for the new prospect. There were a few lines to be completed, and as he was typing in Word the system was constantly changing many of his words as he was writing. This had happened before a long time ago, but he had figured out that he needed to personalize and tune the “Auto Correct” and dictionary and spelling configurations.
He had made many of these changes over time so that he could work faster, and now even this seemed to be screwed up. Running the spell check after his updates, all of the technical terms and words that he had previously added to his personal custom dictionary were also lost, and he had to manually run them. Now he was really running late.
He clicked the print icon, tossed his laptop into his bag and ran past the printer on his way out. But the document was not there. Stressed and frustrated, he fired up his laptop again, logged on, opened the document and this time clicked through the menu of file, print and then started searching for his printer in a jungle of all kinds of strange descriptions. Which one was it???
Fortunately he noticed a tag on the printer “NY_Sales_PRT064032”, and after a few minutes found that a print driver with the same name still existed on his laptop even after the new Windows 7 installation. A little relieved but still stressed, he selected the printer, printed and grabbed the documents before rushing out the door.
His colleague was all ready with the car outside, and they took off at light speed to make this important appointment. With the business proposal in his hands he started flipping through the pages and realized that something had gone terribly wrong.
The whole document was printed on poor quality paper, and the company’s logo and headers weren’t on the pages. How could this have happened???
When printing these kind of documents to that specific printer, it had always selected the tray with really nice, high-quality paper with the company header and logo.
So there he was. Late. Uncertain about the quality of his proposal. Unhappy with its sloppy appearance. He was feeling the heat—bad— and the last thing his proposal needed was sweat spots.
Needless to say, he told me that the day did not turn out very well. Less than an hour after that meeting the company’s VP of Sales instructed him to get on a plane and head to HQ the very next day. And here he was…
The change to Windows 7 can be a great upgrade for your business and users. There are many advantages and enhancements. Making sure that users get all of their data and applications back after the migration is a very good start. However, remember that every user has customized and personalized most of their applications over time. They customize their calendar, their notes, the way their Office applications work, printers, web browser and more. Most of these individual customizations are done to be more productive and efficient.
If you are planning to implement Windows 7, you must consider how it will impact your users. By separating all of the user settings, customizations and personalization from the applications and the operating system, you can easily make the move to Windows 7 and let users keep their own personal workspace at the same time!
How will the transition to Windows 7 impact End-User Productivity and Helpdesk Workload in your organization?
Read also: Emerging Technology - Dynamic, User-Centric & Context-Aware Desktops
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