Toolkit

Story: Closing the Office door on Microsoft

Posted by: Arthur B. (Wednesday 16 June 2004, 8:00 PM)

It's actualy more then 5 years in most countries for various kinds of data.

Ask various large (governmental) organizations why they spend so much (tax) dollars just on keeping historical data accessable. (investigating the problems within large organizations magnifies the problems smaller organizations migth face)

Question to ask: should you allow yourself to access data with a software product that's no longer supported by its vendor? And could thus lead to various unexpected results (or the other way around, unexpected results because of the time gap between the software product used to access historical data) which you yourself may solve? How do you search in such data? How do you inventory it? How do you avoid locking yourself into a certain vendor's product range? How do you communicate (historical) data with third parties that don't use your software products? What if there are unsupported commands (like macro commands) active in the historical file? Or have external links to resources that no longer exist (or worse, have been replaced)? Etc, etc.

It's not a question of being able to open A file. The question is being able to open THE file you're looking for. While maintaining overview of possible relations with other files in the right order.

Organizations that store data in open formats (as opposed to closed formats) right from the start have less problems to deal with. And face fewer business (and legal) risks. Although that will no doubt differ from country to country and from year to year.

As such Microsoft's DRM will lead to interesting additional problems in the coming years. Just imagine loosing access to your historical data, do as Dr. Microsoft ordered. or start a mass scale migration project (there goes the elaged time saved years earlier).