IT professionals are wary about migrating to Microsoft’s Office 2010, a new study reveals.
The 953 respondents surveyed by Dimensional Research were enthusiastic about the office productivity suite but nearly 80% were worried about the complexity of migration. The majority – 85% - of pros polled plan to migrate; but just one in five has plans to deploy in 2010.
"IT teams feel the Office 2010 migration is a large, complex and daunting project that they are not ready to embrace", according to the report, commissioned by Dell Kace. Leading causes of concern included training for the new ribbon interface, compatibility with current applications and licensing.
Key survey findings
• Only 20% of survey respondents have deployed Office 2010 to some number of machines, and only four percent have rolled out Office 2010 fully.
• 18% plan to deploy broadly in 2010.
• 85% reported plan to upgrade to Office 2010 eventually.
• 78% reported concerns over upgrading to Office 2010.
Systems migration specialist EnlightKS recently completed a migration for Swedish Bank, Swedbank. They confirm the multi-faceted nature of the task. Tim Cooper, chief operating officer, says, "Migrating to Office 2010 presents many challenges. Behind the scenes there is a requirement for system and file migration to any new formats and file extensions.”
However, the impact on the end user is arguably a greater challenge since Office 2010 represents a very different experience to Office 2003, confirms Cooper. Specifically, he says, failure to train end users will create frustration, lead to poor productivity and have a detrimental impact on motivation.
IT support and training staff should heed this advice as cumulative problems can lead to an internal perception of project failure. When providing classroom or online training, make sure it’s too generic. "This is not acceptable in today’s climate since this will incur excessive costs and be largely irrelevant", adds Cooper.
EnlightKS recommends the following five-point plan to smooth migration to Office 2010:
• Work with users to produce list of job roles
• Map Office 2010 skills needs on to job roles
• Measure individuals’ current skills in Office 2010
• Deliver short needs-based training program tailored to the individual
• Measure and report on business-wide readiness to change
Microsoft’s compatibility advice
Microsoft offers IT staff plenty of deployment advice for Office 2010, flagging up the following when running existing solutions with the 64-bit version of Office 2010:
• Native 64-bit processes in Office 2010 cannot load 32-bit binaries, which causes problems when companies have existing ActiveX controls and add-ins.
• Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code written for 32-bit must be recompiled to work with the 64-bit version of Office 2010.
• Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is not compatible.
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