What kind of customer research went into developing the Microsoft Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit?
Sigler: The Access Conversion Toolkit was largely driven by customer concern around the challenges of handling possible conversion errors, identifying unknown databases, migration control and maintenance. We have spent the past 14 months visiting more than 30 customers internationally, trying to understand their concerns and building tools to alleviate the fear and pain they expected to experience when rolling out Office 2003. The team also undertook a pilot program where we spent at least two weeks in-house with selected customers, guiding them through the conversion process. Those customers had anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 Microsoft Office Access databases (MDBs) that needed to be converted. In addition, we surveyed more than 1,000 Access developers to acquire details on Access conversion errors and to understand the top conversion errors that we needed to address.
