Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/9825
and rollout Office 2010 to 10 percent of the firm by April 16th. We had completed many types of rollouts throughout the firm before, but this rollout posed some unique challenges. The two biggest challenges were a short deadline for the pilot and fitting in the project with other IT priorities. In spite of these challenges, however, we were still able to effectively begin a seamless migration of users to Office 2010. This was largely due to the free tools and guidance provided by Microsoft, as well as a lot of effort by our staff. We deployed Office 2010 and Windows 7 x64 to 112 users in 11 different groups across 8 offices. OUR TECHNOLOGY CULTURE Since 2003, Fish & Richardson has been using Office 2003 with Windows XP as the basis for our core image. We’re not your typical law firm; we don’t use a lot of add-ins from outside vendors. As part of our 10 percent pilot, we’re trying to eliminate even more add-ins. We’ve dropped our document comparison tool and metadata cleaning tools, and we long ago wrote our own integration with our DMS. We’re strongly encouraging our employees to use the tools built into Office. With the new “backstage view,” employees can easily clean their documents themselves. In addition, with our XP image, our users have full administrative rights to their machines. In our next generation image, we’re removing admin rights along the way. With Windows 7 x64 and Office 2010, we believe we’ve found the right combination for our next image. PROJECT MANAGEMENT Designating team leads and utilizing the right organizational tools contributed to our success. We appointed a project manager and assigned staff to lead the following areas: training, documentation, technical issues, testing, communication and marketing. To keep the team organized and informed, we relied on SharePoint and developed a site that accounted for all the dimensions of the project. This site was the single, central location for information and communication for the team. With easy access to all team communication and project updates, our team members were apprised of any obstacles that would come up during the rollout process as well as the project’s overall progress. EARLY TESTING Our first step began with beta testing Office 2010 and ensuring that our applications worked seamlessly with it. We tested the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Office 2010. As part of our rollout, we were also deploying Windows 7 x64. We quickly discarded the 64-bit version of Office 2010 when we realized that all of our internal and external add-ins would have to be recompiled to support Office 2010 x64. We developed our own Ribbons for Word and Outlook during our testing process. We spent a lot of time surveying our users about the toolbars and buttons they used in Office 2003. Based on that feedback, we created mock-ups of our Ribbons and asked for additional feedback. We then deployed new Ribbons for Word and Outlook. We tried to keep them as simple as possible and didn’t include any Microsoft buttons. We only included buttons for our custom templates/macros and for third-party tools like Best Authority. We avoided recreating the formatting Ribbons that Microsoft already invested millions of dollars in developing. What’s good for the MS goose is good for the firm. Plus, with Office 2010, our employees could build their own custom Ribbons. www.iltanet.org Microsoft 15