We’ve been waiting for this one. The OMPM is finally and officialy realeased:
For those who are not familiar with OMPM; it is short for Office Migration Planning Manager and is similar to what ACT (Application Compatibility Toolkit) does for Vista, only OMPM ‘does it’ for Office. It provides you with a set of tools that enables you to to scan the pc’s and file shares for document conversion issues. The purpose of this free tool is to simplify the migration to Office 2007.
Information that you can retrieve from this tool is which documents have which type of conversion issues. After examing this data, you can decide which documents you want to convert automatically (a conversion tool is provided with the OMPM) and which files you do not want to touch. In addition, it tells when documents have last been modified and that information can be used to archive those ‘ever lasting’ documents.
I’ve been playing around with this version of the OMPM this morning and I have to admit that is has some improvements over the Preview version Microsoft has released a few months ago. Improvements I’ve noticed are:
* Access databases can now also be analyzed.
* More conversion issue types are included (see picture) and more information on those issues is provided
* The VET (Version Extraction Tool) works. In earlier versions of Word a user was able to save multiple versions of a document in one document. This feature was barely used and is now removed from the Office 2007 feature list. But this means that if you open such a doc with Office 2007 (even in compatibility mode!) you’ll loose those different versions. The VET can extract those different versions automatically and store them in a folder called “[FileName] Versions”
So with this handy tool in place, we are ready to migrate those Office suites!
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Nice, perhaps one can gather more reasons to migrate to OpenOffice instead…?
- Paul
great article i love it