Microsoft’s Office 2007 productivity suite is now seeing growth in take-up from business customers, but document file compatibility remains a difficult hurdle to overcome, especially as the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) ratification of Microsoft’s XML file formats is likely to introduce changes to them in the near future.

Office 2007’s official release was over a year ago, but the new suite saw only limited adoption at first. This is now changing as a growing number of businesses move to deploy the latest version of Microsoft’s productivity suite. Indeed, about 43 per cent of enterprises already have it running on their network to some extent, according to a report published by Forrester Research in April.

This rise in adoption is also confirmed by Converter Technology, a firm specialising in helping organisations migrate from older versions of Office. It has seen a hike in demand for its services over the past few months, according to president and chief executive Rob McWalter.

“As a business, we now have 50 different migration projects under way representing 16 million seats, and 20 of these projects started in the past six weeks. Uptake of Office 2007 is now taking shape,” he said.

This increase in uptake is in line with expectations, according to McWalter, as Office versions typically follow an adoption curve where the tipping point comes about 18 months after launch.

“This is what Microsoft expected at launch, and we’re now about 16 months in,” said McWalter.

However, Office 2007 may also be getting a boost following the decision by the ISO in April to adopt the Office Open XML (OOXML) formats as a recognised standard for document files.

Many organisations, especially in the public sector, had previously indicated they were only prepared to use fully documented file formats, so as to ensure that documents can still be accessed in the future when the applications that created them may have been long superseded. This had led many to favour the OpenDocument Format (ODF) instead, an open standard used by many applications such as the OpenOffice.org suite.

But it soon emerged that the ISO ratification process has resulted in several changes to OOXML, with the result that the current applications in Office 2007 do not comply fully with the standard, known as IS29500. Microsoft has acknowledged that this is the case.

Late last week Microsoft announced it has defined a road map for its implementation of the IS29500 specifications, but this support will only come in the next major release of the Microsoft Office system, codenamed Office 14. No official release date is available for this version of the suite, but it is widely expected to ship sometime in 2009.

In addition, Microsoft said that it intends to update Office 2007 with support for ODF v1.1, the Acrobat PDF format and Microsoft’s own XML Paper Specification (XPS). This will come in the Service Pack 2 update to the suite, due in the first half of 2009.
The ISO ratification is currently undergoing a two-month appeal process, and so the final specification itself is not likely to be published until sometime in June.

However, Microsoft is keeping silent regarding the policy customers should adopt now that Office 2007 is not fully compatible with the ratified ISO specifications. Organisations already using the suite will be storing company information in files using a format that is effectively going to be unsupported in the near future.

While the Office 2007 applications are still likely to be able to access such documents, future versions of the suite may only have support for the official ISO specifications. Organisations may thus have to convert these documents, or risk them becoming inaccessible in the future.

This is where companies such as Converter Technology may be able to come to the rescue. The firm already has tools available that are designed to discover Office documents on a corporate network and convert them automatically to the Office 2007 formats.

Problem areas are identified at the same time, according to McWalter. “An Excel chart in Office 2003 will not behave the same way if opened in Office 2007, so we identify those files and fix that issue,” he said.

Converter Technology has so far been advising firms to drastically shorten their migration timeframe as the best way to avoid document compatibility problems.

“The issue is that most companies migrate in a phased manner, which means some users are on older versions of Office than their colleagues for some time,” McWalter said. This was not so critical in previous migrations, but the Office 2007 file formats are so different to those used in earlier versions that it makes more sense to upgrade the entire organisation simultaneously, he added.

McWalter indicated he had not yet seen how the OOXML formats will be affected by the changes made for ISO ratification, but said he was not anticipating it to cause any difficulty for customers migrating to Office 2007.

Nevertheless, organisations planning a migration in the near future might be advised to hold off deployment of Office 2007 applications until Microsoft has delivered an update to these, or until the next full version of the suite ships.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) recently issued similar advice, warning UK educational establishments against widespread deployment of Microsoft Office 2007 and to avoid saving any files in OOXML until it is clear that there will not be difficulties regarding interoperability.