In today’s world of budgetary and credit issues, many companies are cutting back on the basic technology upgrades that are necessary to ensure proper productivity.
How does this apply to SharePoint, a product that can be economy independent due to its ability to increase worker productivity?
In my case, my former employer had delayed an upgrade to XP and Vista for several years citing cost and OS instability (fair enough). Thus we were stuck at Windows 2000 SP4 for the OS; IE6 and Office 2003 for the SharePoint specific desktop tools. However, since the basic Windows SharePoint Server is a “free” product, Management made the decision to upgrade SharePoint itself from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0. (That process in itself is a topic for another time, as anyone who has attempted such a task can attest.)
Now don’t get me wrong regarding WSS 3.0 and it’s compatibility with IE6/Office 2003, it works as a simple collaborative tool for the most part without issue. However once people have their “light bulb” moment with the product and start to attempt to utilize some of the more advanced features, this is where the pain points start to occur. It could be something simple like the 100 Character Limit within the Explorer View that I referenced in a previous post, it could be end users attempting to subscribe to an RSS feed with a Browser or Email client that can’t support the technology, users may receive errors when attempting to select content types in order to save it to a Document Library,
(http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292) the list goes on and on.
The end result is that all these little annoyances add up, and if you are one of the usually small team or the only resource your company has for SharePoint, it’s not the end of the world, but it does add to a SharePoint Admins already heavy workload.
Now the big question, what to do? For now there really isn’t much one can do, except follow up on all the Microsoft Hotfixes and Service Pack updates. If you are in a position like I describe, make sure your Management is aware the WSS 3.0 Product and all of its features were designed to be used with Office 2007, and should be planned for accordingly.
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