Sierra Wireless makes the upgrade

Sierra Wireless produces wireless modems and enabling software to feed the expanding global demand for mobile connectivity. Founded in Canada in 1993, Sierra has branched out to the US, Europe and Asia. Fuelled by a mission to provide innovative and reliable solutions to an unplugged workforce, Sierra recently acquired Wavecom, doubling in size overnight. Around that time it also decided to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007.

Decisions, decisions...
A decision to upgrade a significant corporate asset can be challenging. Upgrade implementers may feel that the necessary tools to deploy the upgrade are difficult to use and locate. They might also be unsure that they have all the necessary tools.

This can lead organizations to retain their current version of an application suite, leaving the organization unable to realize the full value of its asset. The current base of users has documents, databases, and personal preferences that must be retained. And of course the upgrade must not disrupt the daily business of the enterprise and the work of its employees.

"Microsoft has made improvements to data integration," says Sheri McLeish, an information and knowledge management analyst at Forrester Research. "An effective implementation can add real benefits and capabilities. For example, there are many ways for SharePoint and Office to extend capabilities through modules and add-ons."

This news hasn't been lost on Sierra Wireless. A number of years back, Sierra made the business decision to map out the organization's technological direction. They decided to proceed with what John Bugliarisi, Director of IT and Services at Sierra, describes as "a broader relationship with Microsoft."

This includes desktop, server (Exchange, SQL Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and development applications (Visual Studio). Sierra made the move from being a Select customer to having an Enterprise Agreement in an effort to become as cost effective as possible.

In fact, it was customer initiative that necessitated the upgrade to SharePoint 2007.

"We were going through a build of our QMS (Quality Management System) as part of an ISO certification track," says Bugliarisi. "We evaluated a lot of tools, and decided to develop the QMS inside SharePoint 2007." McLeish says that in the past macros had been a barrier to Office upgrades, but that now, as was the case with Sierra, QMS and certification requirements can be a driver.

"There has been a big leap in the interface, and it's much easier to handle transitions," she says. "In the past converting legacy content that had been highly customized using visual basic code could be expensive and daunting."

McLeish notes that templates can now be generated easily within any Office application. They can also be designed from scratch to meet specific needs, which is what Sierra did when it brought in an outside contractor to develop templates for the QMS in Office 2007.

Bugliarisi points out that this created a "huge pressure internally to get users to 2007, so they could use the QMS." Externally, Sierra's customers and partners also exerted a push as compatibility issues cropped up with documents being generated in different versions.

Enterprise Agreement adds value The time had come. Bugliarisi recognized that people were hungry for it, but upgrades cause concern around the potential reaction of the user community and the real possibility of flooding support issues: "training was the biggest hurdle to overcome - we wanted to minimize downtime and ensure our users were productive as quickly as possible."

As a response to these challenges, Bugliarisi had a number of discussions with Microsoft about how they could help. Sierra then signed an Enterprise Agreement, which automatically made them eligible for the advantages of Software Assurance (SA). Sierra's SA included online training, which allowed Bugliarisi's team to move forward with confidence without extending the IT spend.

"When you give people an opportunity for training, they really jump on that. Cheat sheets and function mapping documents provided by Microsoft eased the shock. The SA really stood out and it came with all those other carrots - e-learning, training vouchers, the home use program and employee purchase program."

McLeish says that basic training is a must, for the simple reason that people are unaware of the feature sets. And where new capabilities are concerned, there is a real role for partner involvement.

"For example, I had an inquiry from a client that needed help managing sales presentations," says McLeish.

"They were manually updating PowerPoint, and wanted to know if there was an application they could buy. But this is a native capability in SharePoint. You can use visual basic code to embed an Excel file. This is straightforward, it's not complex - they had all the tools. These kinds of scenarios provide great opportunities for partners and business providers to extend the capabilities of their clients."

The EA also offers benefits from a planning perspective - something that returns value daily.

"The EA helps us understand what our spend is going to be on a licensing side," Bugliarisi says. "We know what's coming. That's nice because it is not a full-time job for me to track our licensing."

Sierra is going to roll out the upgrade to its European offices next. The success of the first deployment, which met the set deadline, gives this initiative the confidence to go ahead. A second deployment should go even smoother.