Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Doug Mahugh has a short post this morning that highlights some resources for the “Office Migration Planning Manager” on Channel 9. This is a great set of tools for anybody looking at mass migration of their older binary office files to the Open XML file format.

The post is short, so I’ll make it easy and quote the whole thing.

As more organizations are moving to Office 2007 and the Open XML formats, I’ve started to hear more questions about how to work with the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), the set of tools that helps manage bulk conversion from the legacy Office binary formats Open XML.

Here’s a resource on Channel 9 that I just learned about: the “Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) Contributions” page. It covers some tips about how to determine which documents have macros, by directly querying the OMPM database. Check it out if you’re planning to use OMPM to manage your deployment of Open XML.

Over the years the industry has learned a great deal about the cost and pain that is inflicted through the introduction of a change to an existing file format, or the introduction of an entirely new format.

With the introduction of Ecma Open XML support in Office there are a couple of important sets of tools that have been made available to help make it easier and more cost effective to migrate to the new XML based format.

OMPM is one, another tool that is worth looking at for any organization considering using the Open XML format is the Office Compatibility Pack which allows earlier versions of Microsoft Office to read and write the new file format without the need to upgrade to a later version of the Office software.