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Hi David,

On the subject of training and Office 2007...

We had our 2nd SBSC meeting in York last night, which went down great!

One of the special guests that I booked, was one of my local Office/Sharepoint trainers and he did a 20 minute stint showing the 15 members Office 2007.

When I briefed Stuart about a week ago, I was clear to point out that it is not enough just to show people 2007, afterall many of us will have seen the Beta/Launch PR/demo DVDs/MAPs etc - we needed to give them the REAL business features and new enhanced ways of producing business comunications.  This also needs to be very UK focused, which unfortunately means much of the collateral from the mothership is too elevated and beyond the scope of 95% of UK businesses (ie all of those who have 100 or less employees)

Stuart did a great job and everyone took home a few new ideas.

I rounded off Stuart's session with a statement which effectively reminded the members that they would not sell 2007 as an upgrade to 2003 unless they show the new stuff and WOW the client with it.  Everyone expects that the core functionality will still be there - ie a spreadsheet will always be a spreadsheet - Excel 2007 keeps that of course, but what it now does is re-invents the ease/functionality/look effectively giving us all the bells/whistles and shortcuts to let our users make fantastic output easily and quickly.  That oftens needs to be shown to the client by the SBSC consultant to clinch the deal!

We need to remember 2007 is not just an upgrade.  (not you David of course!)

2007 is an easy sell if the message is pitched right.

regards

Andrew

Yorkshire SBSC