The last couple of weeks have brought the release of tools (4 tools in 2 weeks!) to help IT Professionals expedite Office 2010 deployment. This posts highlights those four newly released tools and provides links to get started learning about using them. Respectively, these tools help you assess and plan for an Office 2010 deployment, assess potential Office application compatibility issues, and customize your Office 2010 deployment.
1. Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit 5.0 (MAP)
MAP is an assessment and planning tool targeted at IT Professionals to help them begin the deployment process. The tool inventories your current environment and assesses the readiness of those computers for migration to the new technology, in this case Office 2010. MAP is an agentless tool, this means it can discover the computers in your network without installing any components on the target computers. MAP uses technologies already available in your IT environment to perform inventory and assessments. These technologies include Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services, and the Computer Browser service. You can explore all of the capabilities of MAP on the MAP website.
We previously posted about the beta availability of the MAP 5.0 toolkit here. Thanks to community feedback we were able to improve the tool to provide an improved assessment proposal and report. You can have a quick view of the sample Office 2010 readiness reports here: Office 2010 Summary Proposal Sample, Office 2010 Assessment Report Sample
2. Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT)
OEAT scans client computers for add-ins and applications that interact with Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, the 2007 Office system, and Office 2010. The tool is designed to be used by IT Pros who are assessing application compatibility as part of their Office 2010 migration planning. The tool now incorporates functionality to compare the discovered add-ins and applications against the list of add-ins that are pledged to be compatible by ISVs who submit them to the Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Application Compatibility Visibility Program. OEAT compares the vendor name, product name, and version name and reports the results as partial or exact matches in the summary report spreadsheet. For more information, see the Microsoft Office Environment Assessment Tool user's guide in the technical library.
3. Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI)
OCCI is an add-in developers can use in Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Microsoft Word 2010, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to troubleshoot and resolve potential issues with Microsoft Visual Basic for Application (VBA) Macros and add-ins. The tool helps guide a developer in remediating issues in VBA code to expedite migration to Office 2010. The tool scans code in a project for known compatibility issues, and then notifies you if it finds items in the code from the object model that have changed in some way or have been removed. For more information, see the Microsoft Office Code Compatibility Inspector user's guide in the technical library.
4. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1
MDT 2010 offers a great way to package Office 2010 and expose the Office Customization Tool and Office config.xml settings for easy manipulation. IT Pros can use this tool to build a complete desktop deployment package including Office 2010. You can see a complete example of how to utilize MDT 2010 to deploy Office 2010 in this blog post on the Springboard Series Blog. Get MDT 2010 Update 1 now and get started using MDT 2010 to build a complete deployment package. See the full description of the MDT 2010 update 1 here.
If you are looking for a way to see the tools in action we have a proof of concept kit to help you get started. The PoC Jumpstart is designed to help demystify the process of desktop deployment that delivers Office 2010, Windows 7 Enterprise, Internet Explorer 8, & Application Virtualization (App-V) in a controlled environment. The tools above, and others, are featured in the Microsoft Proof of Concept Jumpstart kit to help you quickly experience a complete desktop deployment. Explore the PoC Jumpstart kit here on the Springboard Series site.
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