News

Office 2010 Migration Tools Released as Betas

• By Kurt Mackie
• 12/07/2009

Microsoft on Monday released betas of two new tools to help IT organizations with Office 2010 migrations.

The tools include the Office Environment Assessment Tool beta and the Office Code Compatibility Inspector beta. In addition, Microsoft released a draft version of its "Application Compatibility Assessment and Remediation Guide" to help conceptualize the migration process.

IT pros can use Microsoft's Office Environmental Assessment Tool to check for any Office add-ins and determine if they will migrate safely to Office 2010. In addition, IT organizations may want to use the tool to check for any macros or third-party applications.

Users migrating to Office 2010 also face using Microsoft's new Open XML document formats. However, Michael Kiselman, technical product manager for Office 2010, said in October that the older binary formats of Office should migrate to Office 2010 largely without any compromised fidelity.

IT pros can use Microsoft's Code Compatibility Inspector tool to check for Visual Basic for Applications, VB.NET and C# code and determine whether that code will port well to Office 2010 or not. Microsoft offers the Code Compatibility tool for use with either Office 2010 or Visual Studio.

Finally, Microsoft's "Application Compatibility Assessment and Remediation Guide" describes how to address customizations that may exist in an IT environment before moving to Office 2010. Microsoft describes an Office customization as a process that relies on "macros, templates, add-ins and automation."

The guide describes how to assess a system and plan for compatibility testing. Users can then run scans using Microsoft's two new tools and determine any compatibility issues. The last part of the guide deals with testing the remediation solutions.

More information on Microsoft's Office 2010 migration tools and draft document can be found at this Microsoft blog.