How to minimize the pain of an Office 2007 upgrade
Ignoring dead documents, wrestling with templates, and other changeover joys
December 01, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Moving to a new office is never fun. The same goes for moving to a major new release of Microsoft Office -- which Office 2007 happens to be.
There is new, heftier software to be installed, employees to be retrained for Office 2007's new 'Ribbon' interface, documents that need to be migrated to 2007's new XML-based file format, and more.
Office 2007 is the ninth version released by Microsoft in the last decade and a half. Many companies have developed expertise on how to plan and perform this migration. And Microsoft offers tools, some of them free, to help.
Still, many companies find themselves beleaguered with the scope of the task, and seek outside help.
ConverterTechnology Inc. is one of the leading consultants in the "help space." The 10-year-old Nashua, N.H. firm started off as a Y2K remediation consultant; when that problem subsided, the company applied the tools and expertise it had gained towards the Office area, starting with the migration of Office 97 users to Office 2000.
The company has migrated one million users of Office from older versions, according to CEO Rob McWalter. ConverterTechnology is usually brought in by a larger consultant such as Accenture or Hewlett-Packard at the beginning of a wider corporate upgrade.
"Deployment plans are big and complicated, we are just one of the many moving parts," McWalter said in an interview last month.
First step: A good housecleaning
One of the first things the firm does is help determine what documents need to be converted to the new format -- in Office 2007's case, Open XML. Surprisingly, that's usually not a high percentage. Up to 80% of documents are "out of service," as McWalter puts it, while only a percentage of the remaining files are business-critical enough to justify a migration.
For example, ConverterTechnology recently helped migrate a "top five global bank" with 75,000 desktops holding more than 43 million Office files in older formats, of which it ended up migrating only 2.5 million, or about 6%, McWalter said.