News

ConverterTechnology Rolls Out Office 2007 Solution

• By Herb Torrens
• 02/18/2009

The Nashua, N.H.-based company initially rolled out its OfficeConverter solution in April. The product has four modules to help with the conversion process. Files that may need conversion are discovered and scanned. The program provides a report to help IT personnel with decision-making, plus a utility to convert the files.

"In an enterprise environment, converting files from older versions of Microsoft Office has always been a challenge," said Chip Bates, director of product development in a recent telephone interview. "Macros in Word, and complex charts in Excel, often require significant data conversion to migrate to newer versions of Office programs."

Bates said the while Microsoft does provide the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), it has a limited tool set that requires significant IT staff time to administer.

"The big difference between OMPM and OfficeConverter is that our product automatically solves many VBA and Excel compatibility issues, whereas OMPM only identifies files that are likely to have compatibility issues but it does not perform any remediation," said Bates. "When you have power users in an enterprise environment that have created hundreds of thousands of files, the conversion process can become quite complex."

ConverterTechnology claims to have helped more than a million users migrate to newer versions of Office. The majority of enterprises will "plan or deploy an upgrade [to Office 2007] over the next 12 months," according to company literature.

Bates said that the company is working on the next version of OfficeConverter that will address the anticipated release of "Office 14" from Microsoft, which may come as soon as late next year.

"As Microsoft moves toward the OOXML (ISO/IEC Open Office XML) standard, we will move as well," said Bates.