SBA opens Office XP for business

The Small Business Administration this summer will give all its users Microsoft XP applications.Throughout the summer, as part of a $7 million technology overhaul, SBA will install Office XP on 3,000 Gateway Inc. PCs. The agency also plans to migrate from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. Officials decided against using the Windows XP operating system because of security concerns, SBA CIO Lawrence Barrett said.There probably would have been a productivity loss throughout the agency if it moved to the XP OS too soon, Barrett said. SBA will reconsider an upgrade to the OS as the product matures and stabilizes, he said. Barrett said that even as the agency was working to convince the small businesses it advises to adopt advanced technology, SBA itself was technically lagging. “We could see on the horizon that we were like two and three generations behind,” Barrett said.