Strained Relations: Reconciling Software Incompatibilities

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Opinion

Strained Relations: Reconciling Software Incompatibilities

9/27/2007

By Terry Calhoun

After what seems like quite some time without having much to address in way of "incompatibilities," I recently found myself coping with a couple of real problems that were affecting my productivity in an important volunteer role that I play. At the same time, I made a decision to go along with the recommendation of my employer's IT staff that guarantees me some learning curve issues, along with likely incompatibilities.

At least one of the incompatibility issues comes from interacting with others who have moved on to Windows Vista. It may be an issue you have already experienced and have had to cope with, or, like one of my colleagues at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), you may have just seen one or two ".docx" files so far. That will change.

Since the adoption of Windows Vista is not proceeding at the pace Microsoft had hoped for, we are entering a world--for at least a year or two--where there will be some major issues about the compatibility of shared Word documents. Here's my story of how the issue arose for me: Note that it will get a little weird, but if you follow along, I will share a couple of useful links to help both Vista users and non-Vista users cope with the ".docx threat"--like when your students start sharing incompatible files with their professors; or your purchasing staff finds out that they can't open vendors' proposals.

You Can Pick Your Friends, and You Can Pick Your Software, but You Can't Pick Your Friends' Software
The ".docx" problem for me came in my role as a founding board member for the relatively new and fast-growing Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Because it is so new and its staff is growing so fast, it has purchased the very latest equipment for that new staff, and they began sending we board members important ".docx" files that we could not open because our colleges and universities, or in my case association, are not yet moving to Vista.

It is extra work for the staff to have to file and store Word documents in one format to share among themselves and then to create and share with (some) volunteer leaders, documents in a different, incompatible format. Although that has caused some problems, it is a compatibility issue that I have found a solution for, as you will see below.

Another compatibility issue I have not found a solution for yet is that our staff is vigorously using Microsoft Groove. I understand the power of that tool, but not everyone on our board has been able to get it working for them yet, so staff is also having to share important documents twice: by e-mail, as well as the more simple method of putting them in a Groove folder, which gives automatic access to board members.

The Groove issue is exacerbated in my case by the fact that I recently gave into my SCUP IT staff and agreed to move to an Apple laptop. As I write this, I am looking at my new laptop, which I am not allowed to use yet. The AASHE staff tells me (as does Microsoft's website) that Groove simply will not work with Apple's operating systems. Sigh. Here's where the rest of my story gets a bit weird because all of this has caused me to have emotional reactions to IT functionalities that are a little more conscious than usual. In turn, that has caused me to think about the ways in which I, and I hope others, may sometimes think of our IT functionalities as having personalities.