Rex Baldazo
To help IS professionals plan their move to Windows 95, Microsoft is offering a CD-ROM called Microsoft Windows 95 Migration Planning Kit. There is quite a bit of useful information to be found here, but there's also a fair amount of propaganda. And, despite coming from a company that has turned out some excellent CD-ROM references, the search engine for this CD-ROM has a cluttered and counterintuitive interface (
see the screen
).
In addition, you must have Excel, Word, and PowerPoint installed before you can use the search engine. We also experienced some glitches with the CD-ROM, such as a Windows 95 help file that, oddly enough, w
ouldn't open in Windows 95.
Rather than digging your way through the search engine, it's much easier to browse the CD-ROM directly. It's organized into directories containing information such as introductory and technical material, as well as information specifically aimed at IS managers.
The IS directory includes an Excel spreadsheet model that lets you input variables, such as how much training you expect to give your support staff, and it then calculates the payback you can expect from moving to Windows 95. Not surprisingly, it's fairly difficult to get the model to show a negative payback. And a disclaimer says that the model does not factor in the cost of the staff-hours you've entered. We found the model to be a great demonstration of some of Excel 5.0's features but an incomplete business-analysis tool.
The jewel in the crown of this collection is the Windows 95 Resource Kit, originally released as a 1400-page book but included here as a set of Microsoft Word files. This is one of
the times that we missed Interleaf, which has a much better multifile book capability than Word. But the book is nonetheless a valuable, and searchable, resource for Windows 95 material.
screen_link (36 Kbytes)
The Microsoft Presentation Builder is too busy and confusing to be usable. Viewing documents requires more mouse-clicks than simply using File Manager directly.
Rex Baldazo is a BYTE technical editor. You can contact him on the Internet or BIX at rbaldazo @bix. com.
Windows 95 Migration Planning Kit
