Assess the impact of deploying Office 2007

Every time a new office version is released, customers have the same reservations and concerns - their Excel macros might break, or Access databases might become unusable. This is a very understandable issue particularly in financial environments whereby millions of dollars could be lost by a malfunctioning custom spreadsheet.

Finally, we now have an automated tool to help derisk this issue and to reduce the level of upfront testing required. We're finding it a great resource in projects whereby the customer wants to accelerate their Office upgrade but is nervous about the impact, given the fact it is impossible to test every spreadsheet in the organisation (one customer we are working with has over 25000 custom Access databases!).

The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) is a collection of tools that enables you to prepare for migration to the Microsoft 2007 Office system. OMPM checks for, and reports on, file properties to help you analyze your environment. You can download OMPM from 2007 Microsoft Office System Migration Guidance: Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?linkid=75727). This can be installed on a server and then it automates the checking of files on shares, desktops and laptops; providing a detailed set of reports on potential issues that you can then manage by exception.

For the most part, documents created in Office 2003 and earlier open and behave the same way in the 2007 Office release. However, there might be instances where files require manual intervention or analysis to ensure consistent behavior. For example, a custom solution built in Microsoft Excel 2003 might require modification because it relies on legacy Office features that are no longer supported in Excel 2007.

Download it now if you are working on an Office deployment project - it will definitely save you lots of time.

OMPM includes the following features:

• The OMPM File Scanner (offscan.exe), a command-line tool that scans files for conversion issues. You can easily deploy this tool using an automated software deployment technology, such as SMS, or a login script. The OMPM File Scanner stores the scan results in XML log files on each computer that it scans. The OMPM File Scanner performs two types of scans:

• A light scan that quickly identifies the Office documents on a user’s computer or network file system.
• A deep scan that you can perform on Office documents to gather document properties that provide indicators of potential conversion issues.
• A set of utilities that automate the creation of a new database (either SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, or SQL Express) and import the XML log files generated by the OMPM File Scanner.
• A Microsoft Access 2007–based reporting solution that provides different reports for your analysis and enables you to define file sets for automated processing.
• The Office File Converter (OFC) that allows you to convert specific files to the new 2007 Office release file formats in bulk.
• The Version Extraction Tool (VET) that allows you to extract saved versions of a file in Word 2003 (or earlier) to different files