Even without the expense and burden of performing the upgrade, Cupcake Royale and Balin Accountancy had many things to be apprehensive about. There is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7, so transitioning from one OS to the other had some potential for hiccups. Moving to new hardware, switching messaging platforms, and other changes could lead to downtime and lost data.

Microsoft and Dell provided each company with about 10 new PCs, each outfitted with antivirus software, Office 2010, and Windows 7 Professional. Cupcake Royale got Dell Vostro 3500 laptops and Balin Accountancy got Vostro desktops.

At Cupcake Royale, the Microsoft and Dell teams spent some two weeks planning and executing the migration. The end result was a virtually flawless switch. There were some minor problems with network and server settings and getting users , but Microsoft and Dell worked those out. E-mail access was offline for five minutes or so during reboots while the server was updated. Individual users were offline for about an hour as their systems were updated and profiles migrated, but they went right back online as if nothing had happened.

At Balin Accountancy, Microsoft and Dell booked four days to migrate hardware and software--which included replacing the Windows 2000 Server running Lotus Notes with a new Windows Server 2008 machine running Exchange Server 2010. They accomplished the project in about three days.

Microsoft also provided users at Cupcake Royale and Balin Accountancy with some orientation to the new environments, with introductory training on Windows 7 and Office 2010 to familiarize users with the features and conventions of the newer software.