In a campus-wide effort coordinated by IET, individuals and groups from numerous departments volunteered their expertise and time to complete compatibility testing with widely-used software applications and critical campus services. Limited testing was done on Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 8. The test results show which applications were tested; which ones functioned as expected; which ones did not; and the problems that surfaced. The results should not be considered “industry standard.”

Why Testing is Important
It is important for the campus to be aware of how widely-used software and critical campus services perform with these new software products and the issues that may arise when these new software products are inevitably adopted. IET recommended testing Vista, Office 2007, or IE8 before recommending it to the campus for the following reasons:

• the first released version of an operating system often has serious bugs and sometimes exhibits some degree of instability until the first service pack is released;
• the first released version of an operating system often has compatibility problems with third-party hardware devices and software until third-party vendors upgrade their device drivers and software (or the affected devices and/or software are upgraded or replaced);
• Vista requires hardware with more processing power, more memory, and a more powerful graphics card than Windows XP, and older computers may not run Vista at expected performance levels and/or be able to take advantage of some of the new security features and Aero interface.