The proliferation of diverse office application suite software presents special support considerations to IT departments. Given the rapidity of application upgrades and the sheer number of vendor-specific suites, it in impractical for IT workers to support all products on the market. For this reason, the standards committee will developing a support strategy for the UVM campus.

Key consideration in the standards process will be:

• Number of installs on campus (scale of current investment)
• Cost of supporting existing software.
• Cost of installation (Fee per-seat and time/effort to install)
• Time until vendor discontinuation of support
• Expertise of support staff
• Availability of staff experienced in suite usage