14 DAY TRIAL // Two new free tools offered through the Microsoft Download Center are designed to deal with potential compatibility issues in scenarios involving migration to Office 2010 or the adoption of Office 365.
Microsoft has already sold in excess of 200 million licenses of Office 2010, but obviously, more customers are yet to make the jump to the latest iteration of the company’s productivity suite.
A key part of the migration process to Office 2010 involves ensuring that existing software investments will not be impacted, or that at least, existing solutions can be adapted to the productivity suite.
At the same time, companies looking to embrace Office 365 can also need to assess incompatibility problems.
The software giant is offering the Office Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI): Office Compatibility and the Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT): Office Compatibility free of charge for those customers gearing up to make the jump to Office 2010, or looking at the company’s Cloud productivity suite.
With OEAT, Microsoft is making it simple for IT professionals to evaluate add-ins and applications in a specific environment for compatibility with Office 2010.
The tool is capable of assessing:
“• Office add-ins that are currently installed
• Programs that are not registered as add-ins but still interact with Office programs
• Information about client computers, such as processor models and types (32-bit or 64-bit), free disk space, Windows version, and Office version
• Report: Add-ins assessment—list of third party programs and information about the compatibility of those programs with Microsoft Office 2010.
• Report: Environmental assessment (potential upgrade issues).”
Customers can leverage the Office Code Compatibility Inspector as part of the process of tailoring their existing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Studio Tools for Office code so to Office 2010 and Office Pro Plus for Office 365.
“It consists of four add-ins that load, one add-in per application, in Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Word 2010, and Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010,” the Redmond company explained.
“The Inspector does not correct code; it inspects code, and then comments specific lines of code that reference items in the object model that have been changed, removed, or deprecated. You can then modify the code based on the comments, or use the links that are provided in the comments to view topics on the Web that are pertinent to a particular line of your code.”
Office Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI): Office Compatibility is available for download here.
Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT): Office Compatibility is available for download here.