Bulk upgrade your binary files to OpenXML

The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) was released earlier this week. It's a tool that helps folks who are going to manage and upgrade to the latest version of Office (2007). Among other things, it will do a scan of your network to identify Office documents and report back to you on the stats of those documents.

A really cool piece of this is that it will allow you to specify that you want to bulk upgrade the existing binary documents (.doc, .xls, and .ppt) into the new file formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx). This will allow you to take advantage of all the benefits that come with the new formats.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2007
  I am curious if it will contain the XML translation and the original binary or just the XML translation of the original ? BTW: I think the new interface to office looks great but i use a mac and am waiting for the Mac version before i get my feet wet. Office 2007 looks like one of the most innovative designs from Microsoft since windows 95.

• Anonymous
  March 02, 2007
  I installed the upgrade manager and tested in Word etc to save as new format. In word you get Save as 2007 on the dialog but not in Excel. For Excel you have to open in Windows and use the Save As function. This seeems really strange. I wanted to develop a macro for old versions of office that (if upgrade manager is installed) could script saving the document as 2007 XML if data was to be sent to our XML system (I am sure our customers do not want to upgrade ALL their documents just yet), but if the conversion is carried out outside of the application we cannot do this. Any comments/ideas?

• Anonymous
  March 02, 2007
  Scot: by default the office file converter creates a new oxml version of the binary file (you now have two files…it’s like a save as). You can change this behavior though if we don't want the two files... Colin: Are you running Office 2000? Check out this blog post for more details on how the compat pack works with various Office versions: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2006/10/30/programmatically-opening-saving-the-new-default-file-formats-in-previous-versions-of-office.aspx -Brian

• Anonymous
  March 02, 2007
  (self promotion) There is also an OMPM wiki started at http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/OfficeDeployment.OMPMv1 There is only basic info there at the moment, but is a great place for questions, feedback, and howto's -Jefferson