January 12, 2010

It has been predicted Microsoft's Office 2010 will cause migration headaches, but for some, the pain is already here. Customers speaking with The Reg are experiencing major delays in their move from Office 2003 to 2007, more than three years after Microsoft released the latest version of its suite.

Problems include having to rewrite and test old VBA Office macros because they won't work in Office 2007, file incompatibilities, major interface changes, and instances where Outlook won't work on different versions of Microsoft's Exchange Server. And while Microsoft has documented known problems, customers have complained it's the undocumented stuff they are uncovering that's really tripping them up and where Microsoft is not being helpful.

It seems that with 2010 on the horizon, some organizations are either only now moving to Office 2007 or are still struggling with Office 2007 more than three years after it shipped. Directions on Microsoft managing vice president of research Rob Helm tells The Reg he expects more customers will experience problems as they too make the move to Office 2007. Helm said some organizations are only now upgrading after postponed the move because of the changes involved.

"Even if you decide on the dawn of Office 2007's arrival to complete a migration, organizations need to find all the macros used for critical tasks and identify a representative sample of files and test them on the new version," Helm said. He said Microsoft could be doing more to help customers with technical and migration consultation under its Software Assurance (SA) program. He noted that small organizations that are unlikely to be on SA are also likely to need assistance, as large enterprises will at least have dedicated IT teams that can plan and implement the upgrade.

But do not rush to assume that Xbox 360 will replace your set-top box. Just consider the console as another “node” that will rely upon users’ current IPTV box for some of its functions, as per Microsoft reps at CES. That will include DVR writing features. Mediaroom on Xbox 360 will rely on PC or current IPTV set-top box for the storage purposes.

Architectural engineering consultant Benchmark Group has postponed its Office 2007 rollout three years after it first looked at the migration. It told The Reg the project is on hold because of both documented and undocumented problems with macro and file-format incompatibilities between Outlook and Word. It has also been unable to use Outlook 2007 in mixed Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 environments. Benchmark, which prides itself as an early adopter of PCs in building design, has had to rewrite each of its 75 macros used by 400 users in mobile, remote, and office-based locations.

Workstation administrator Christopher Blake told us Benchmark had spent "months and months" recoding single macros and still things don't work. "We need the conversion process to happen very smoothly so we are investing a lot of time up front to ensure that," he said.

Source:-http://www.channelregister.co.uk