A few little nudges to improve Office 2010 adoption

Microsoft introduces new tools to make migration easier

Tomorrow, I plan to visit my friendly neighborhood big box retailer, grab a copy of Office 2010 off the shelf, pay for it, go home and install it on my recently purchased laptop that runs only a trial version of Office 2007. Done.

If only enterprises had it so easy.

When businesses deploy a new software suite, they’re installing it on thousands of machines, not just one, which makes migration a big project as you all know. With Office 2010, Microsoft is trying a few things to make it easier to make the upgrade. Microsoft has introduced four new tools in two weeks to hasten Office 2010 deployment, a feat so remarkable, it warranted an exclamation point on a Microsoft Office blog post last week (“4 tools in 2 weeks!”).

Here is a summary of the tools and how they can help (really help!):

1) Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.0.

What MAP does is take inventory of your present IT environment and determines the readiness those computers for the migration to Office 2010. It is an agentless tool so it doesn’t have to install any components on those computers to analyze them. Instead, it uses technologies already existing in the system, including Windows Management Instrumentation, the Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services and the Computer Browser Service. The MAP beta was released March 16. The Office 2010 engineering team has posted examples of what the MAP reports look like.

2) Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT).

This tool scans client computers to determine what add-ins and other applications are running on them to determine their compatibility with Office 2010. It scans versions of Office going back to Office 1997 (that sounds thorough). The OEAT compares discovered add-ins and applications to a list of same “pledged to be compatible” by ISVs under the Microsoft “Application Compatibility Visibility Program.” The results are presented in a spreadsheet format, presumably Excel.

3) Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector (CCI).

CCI is an add-in IT professionals can use to use in Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2010, and Visual Studio 2008 to identify and resolve potential issues with Visual Basic for Applications Macros programming language. The CCI scans code in an existing application for known compatibility issues and then notifies the user if it finds code that has changed or been removed compared to the object model.

4) Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010, Update 1

MDT 2010 helps migration team members in an IT organization to build a complete desktop deployment package for Office 2010. It also helps create deployments of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as earlier versions of those operating systems. It features a set of unified tools and processes on an easy-to-follow console and claims to reduce the amount of time needed to complete deployment.

Microsoft also offers a proof of concept toolkit to demonstrate how the tools will work. It's part of an effort to “demystify the process of desktop deployment” that inhibits some companies from undertaking a migration task.

As much as Microsoft tries to make it easier for customers to upgrade to Office 2010, the migration task is just one factor. Ultimately, the cost and complication of an upgrade has to be weighed against the tangible benefits of being able to work faster, more efficiently, and improve the business in demonstrable ways.

• Microsoft
• Microsoft; Microsoft Office; Office 2010; migration