Migration Aches for Microsoft Office 2007 in the Horizon for 2010
It has been previously predicted that Microsoft Office 2010 will bring forth migration headaches. But for some people, the pain is already experienced.
Customers who talked with The Reg report experiencing the major delays in the move from Office 2003 to 2007, over three years after the software giant released the latest version of the suite.
Problems reported include the need to rewrite and test the old VBA Office macros because they don’t seem to work in Office 2007. There are also the issues of file incompatibilities, major changes in the interface and cases when the Outlook doesn’t work on varied versions of the Microsoft Exchange Server on managed hosting servers.
Microsoft has already documented the known concerns but customers complain that it’s the undocumented things that they are trying to uncover. These are the issues that are tripping them up, making Microsoft of no help to them.
With 2010 here, some organizations are either moving to Office 2007 just now or are still trying to contend with Office 2007 a few years after it has been publicly released.
Rob Heim, Directions on Microsoft managing vice president states that he is expecting more clients to encounter problems as they move to Office 2007 as well. Helm adds that some organizations are upgrading only now after postponing the move due to the required changes.
He also said that Microsoft could do a lot more to help customers through technical and migration consults. This is made possible through the company’s Software Assurance program.
He noted, however, that smaller businesses and organizations may not be on SA but they are likely to need the assistance since large enterprises will probably have dedicated IT teams to worry about their concerns.
