The Office suite plays a major part in Citrix farms. Not only is it probably the most distributed application suite around, it is also the most used and one of the most resource intensive set of applications on Citrix farms. Maintaining a stable and well performing Citrix farm is probably the greatest concern for every Citrix administrator, so the introduction of a new version of the Office suite will make those eye browses frown of the common Citrix administrator.

Microsoft introduced late 2006 a new Office suite, called Office 2007. Earlier releases of the Office suite always had a significant negative impact on the maximum number of users that were allowed to get access to a Citrix server. So the obvious question to ask is: “What is the impact of Office 2007 on a Citrix server compared to Office 2003?�. Are we again facing a considerable performance penalty and, if so, how large is this penalty and which specific resources are impacted?

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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!