Vista And MS Office 2007 - Has Anything Been Learnt A Year After Launch?

Published 29th November 2007

29 November, 2007: One year on from the launch of Windows Vista™ and Microsoft® Office 2007 – what has been the business uptake? What is holding businesses back from upgrading?

At the business availability launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 on November 30 2006 Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft claimed: “We expect that more than 200 million people will be using at least one of these products by the end of 2007.” According to industry experts, one year after the launch, it seems that Microsoft has fallen short of hitting that target. Gartner estimates that only 5% of businesses will have adpoted Vista by the end of the year and Forrester claims that most enterprises will wait between three and five years before switching from older editions of Microsoft's suite to Office 2007.

So what is holding businesses back from adopting this operating system and business software? What are the issues behind enterprises’ reticience to upgrade?

According to Rob McWalter, CEO of migration specialists ConverterTechnology, there are a number of factors:

“One of the reasons for the slower than expected uptake of Office 2007 and Vista is the new user interface and the training required to familiarise users with new navigation. There is also an argument that customers fear there are many other underlying issues and costs attributed to large scale deployments of new software and that is prolonging the time it takes to plan, resource and deploy Office 2007. In fact, the perception of what is involved may be overestimated and the reality can be wide of the mark.
"Microsoft is not naive to these issues and has focused on reducing the cost of desktop deployment with its software - their ultimate aim is to get it to $10 per desktop. But are companies taking into account the hidden costs of deployment, such as data and file migration? One of the points of weakness that enterprises have suffered from when they have tried to upgrade, to Vista and Office 2007 for example, is with application and file compatibility.

"However, enterprises can avoid these pain points and close the reality gap when it comes to understanding what the issues and the actual costs are for upgrading business critical files. We have worked with countless organisations who have successfully upgraded their systems even when, for example, a third of the files seemed to be incompatible. We work with these organisations to help them allocate the right resources – either with ConverterTechnology’s automated tools or their own human intervention to fix them and get them migration-ready. We believe that proprietary software to automate file migration to ensure compatibility, combined with human interaction, will effectively bridge the reality gap.”

“We have successfully migrated over one million users of Microsoft Office from older Office platforms to newer ones and we are already working with companies upgrading to Vista and Office 2007. It can be done in a painless way, involving planning and analysis of the file landscape, but will ultimately result in enterprises being able to take advantage of the new business-efficiency features of Vista and Office 2007 much faster, and have a positive impact on their business in the long-term.”