As featured on Forbes, May 18, 2011:

As 2011 proves to be another busy year of Microsoft version upgrades – for both Windows and Office – enterprise IT shops are trying bring the updates along as painlessly as possible. These may seem like simple upgrade projects to stay current with improved Microsoft features and capabilities, but end-users face particular difficulties adjusting to the latest releases. Specifically, three major end-user challenges associated with these upgrades threaten to place pressure on unprepared help desks.

For organizations moving from Office 2003 or prior versions, one of the biggest challenges for end-users is adjusting to the new Office fluent user interface, commonly known as “the ribbon.” The ribbon replaces the previous menu and toolbars in each Office application. With Office 2007, the ribbon was applied to most Office applications, with the notable exception of Outlook. In Office 2010, these differences carry forward and are coupled with the incorporation of the Ribbon into Outlook, impacting usability of this critical communications application used daily by virtually every corporate end-user. The Ribbon and other new aspects of the Office interface provide an opportunity for increased end-user productivity, but also represent significant changes in the look and feel of the core Office applications.

Jenny Sweeney Office 2010 Forbes, Help Desk, Microsoft, Office, upgrades

This week’s crop of articles restates the obvious: That smart phones and tablets are nudging out the PC in the enterprise. This is good news for the world’s workers (Increased productivity! Style! Portability! All access, all the time!), but it poses a challenge for IT departments. With new devices come increased support needs. (But that’s a topic for another post.)

Gartner predicts that by 2013, more people in the world will access the Internet on a mobile device than on a PC.

“Smartphones have conquered PCs” — CNN

According to research firm IDC, over the past two years, smartphone shipments have tripled, while PC shipments grew by only 45 percent. The trend, reports CNN, is indicative of a marked change in the kinds of devices people are using for everyday computing needs. The article also points to research from Gartner that predicts that by 2013, more people in the world will access the Internet on a mobile device than on a PC. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Mobile Devices, tablets CIO.com, CNN, Forbes, Gartner, Help Desk, IDC, PCs, smartphones

Two articles came across my desk recently that were not related, but read as if they could have been written as companion pieces under one headline. The first looked at how social networks — and the people who use them in particular — can transform the way we work; the other examined the growing focus on strong people skills in IT.

Nowadays, it’s “more about what gets done than about what you know,” Schaffner writes.

The two pieces together illuminate the shift that’s happening in IT. Help desks are replacing rudeness with customer care, and beginning to see their role as enabling employees to be more productive, rather than fixing computers that have caught fire. This new focus on soft skills goes hand in hand with discovering different, more effective ways of collaborating.

In the first article, which ran in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, Cisco VP of enterprise Alan Cohen discusses how work has changed, from “local to global, from centralized to decentralized.” He mentions the significant investment in transaction systems, including ERP and e-mail, in the past decade to reduce business costs and redundancy. But those systems have had their run, and now it’s time for innovation and productivity to come from people themselves. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Customer Service, Social Media Alan Cohen, Cisco, Forbes, Fortune, Mike Schaffner