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January 2007

On-line software training courses

Medical campus faculty, staff and students now have access to free on-line training courses for Microsoft software.  The self-paced "e-learning" content collection comes from MindLeaders®.

Available topic areas include: Access, Excel, Internet Explorer, Office, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, SharePoint, Visio, Windows, and Word.  (Click on the links for additional information about availability and documentation for those applications.)  This curriculum was selected on the basis of a 2006 campus survey.

To access the Mindleaders course site, go to the login page.  Your login credentials are your Medical ID and associated password.  See Mindleaders: Getting Started for additional information and first steps.

Course completions and quiz scores are recorded on the site under your Medical ID.  You can also print completion certificates.  When PDTO replaces NetLearning (sometime in 2007) we will begin exporting completion reports to the successor system.

Traditional classroom-format courses for commonly-used software are currently available only on the Coral Gables campus, though the UM-Coral Gables Information Technology End-User Support Group.  Click on the link to view that group's current schedule of classes.

Windows Vista and Office 2007

This year marks the debut of two important Microsoft software releases: Windows Vista, the successor to XP, and Office 2007, the latest version of the popular office productivity suite. 

We are testing both of these prior to deployment, to assure compatibility with campus applications.  While both provide significant functional improvements, they also require more computing "horsepower" than their predecessors -- a consideration if you plan to upgrade software on your current PC, and when you buy a new one.

February's Technology Update will be devoted to issues associated with Office 2007, and March's edition will cover Vista.  Topics will include major differences from the prior versions, minimum hardware requirements, where to go to find training materials, and more.  Until then, you can find more information from Microsoft at the Windows Vista and Office 2007 sites.

IE7: It's OK to upgrade unless...

It's OK to upgrade to Microsoft's newest release of Internet Explorer -- IE7 -- unless you use any of the handful of applications that are still incompatible with it. 

For medical campus users, that includes GE Imagecast (a.k.a., RIS/PACS or UMRIS) and Ingeniux CMS.  Unfortunately, we have no definitive information about when compatible releases of these applications will be available.

If you don't use an application with IE7 "issues" then upgrading is the right decision.  IE7 offers significant security and functional improvements over IE6.  (You'll find a course on IE7 at the MindLeaders site.)