Businesses planning an upgrade to Microsoft's Office 2007 could face a sterner challenge than they realise, according to Converter Technology, a firm specialising in migration services. The new file formats are just one of many issues that have to be solved, making this a more difficult transition than previous Office upgrades.

Converter Technology has already been assisting some UK businesses with an Office 2007 migration this summer, and said many of these met with more problems than they expected.

Companies can expect to find that 15 to 20 per cent of files will have compatibility issues, according to Converter’s president and chief executive, Rob McWalter. “If a typical customer has 10 million document files, then over a million are at risk. These issues would typically require a programmer to fix and cost millions - ­ we can save them from that,” he said.

The new Open XML file formats are the chief issue, especially as many firms will synchronise an Office migration with their desktop corporate refresh cycle, leading to some users having the new suite while others are still using the old version. As a result, many users will not be able to open documents from colleagues.

Companies could address this by enforcing use of legacy file formats during a transition, but this cripples much of the new functionality. “When you lock down files to the old format, you end up running in compatibility mode. It doesn’t work as cleanly ­ in fact, some things don’t work at all; the new functionality around editing and commenting isn’t all there,” McWalter said.

In this case, firms may not see the full benefit of their investment until everyone has migrated, which would usually take several years. The best policy is to compress the migration period as much as possible, according to McWalter.

Other issues include commands in Visual Basic (VBA) scripts, some of which are no longer supported in Office 2007. Application features have also changed. For example, Excel now supports vastly larger spreadsheets and differs in the way it handles cell references, so some financial models may no longer function.

The first thing companies should do when planning a migration is to assess which functions they are using in the current Office suite are vital to operations, McWalter said. “We have proprietary tools to do discovery of Office files and determine usage patterns, capturing this information to see what needs to be migrated,” he added.
For companies using Converter’s migration service, the next step is a pilot phase with a nominated workgroup.

“We map our processes and tools into their project deployment, and we end up with a good operational plan for rollout across the entire enterprise,” McWalter said. The full rollout then uses Converter’s tools as part of the deployment.

The cost of Converter’s services is small compared with the overall cost of migration, according to McWalter, typically costing about £3 per seat for a firm with 25,000 seats.

“Customers are used to thinking of assets as hardware and software. They need to think of the information in their files as their real assets,” McWalter said.