features of Microsoft® Office® 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 introduces many important enhancements and new features, a firm obviously cannot take advantage of these features if they are tied to an older version of Office through a collection of legacy templates, customizations, and third-party add-ins and integrations. So a significant part of our analysis has centered on how to migrate these existing capabilities to Office 2010 allowing firms to then take advantage of the new features. Often there are many similar templates that differ only in things like letterhead, headers or footers, etc.

It is important to do some upfront work in the performing an inventory of your existing templates and how they are used. This permits an analysis to be done regarding how to migrate different types of the templates. A decision also must be made as to how to implement often-complex document creation user interface behavior. It previous versions of Office and this were frequently implemented using a custom dialog that collects appropriate information regarding the type of document. in order to migrate from MS Office 2007 to Office 2010, you could use the migration planner and other tools.The process is very much simpler and avoids you from data loss.

Most firms also have application-level customizations in the form of macro libraries that automate common tasks, along with user interface customizations to menus and toolbars to access these macros. Finally, there is usually third-party add-ins that provides either functionality not available in the applications, or enables integration with other systems. Each of these categories has its own migration challenges and strategies that would be discussed below. One option is to do the minimum amount of the work possible to make existing customizations and functionality work in Office 2010. The second approach is to the redesign your customizations to fully take advantage of the Office 2010 development model and the Office 2010 user interface model. While this approach might be more the expensive up front it opens the door to taking advantage of the Office 2010 productivity enhancements and leads to a stronger strategic position going forward.

• FIVE – Third-Party Add-ins

  Third-party add-ins represents a significant challenge when migrating and not all vendors update their add-ins as quickly as you might like. Sometimes updates to add-ins are attached to a requisite upgrade to backend systems and the most frustrating is that all of this is out of your control. It is important to assess all of your current add-ins to determine if they are still necessary in Office 2010. Some functionality such as scrubbing of hidden data and conversion to PDF might be available in an acceptable way within the new version of Office.

• FOUR – Application Customizations

  The vast majority of the application-level customizations you have seen consist of VBA macros and associated toolbars and buttons. Even for macro functionality that is still compatible with Office 2010, you might want to the consider migrating to a managed-code and .NET development model. This approach enables a stronger development model as well as a stronger more flexible deployment and the supportability approach than VBA. On the user interface side there have obviously been the significant changes in Office 2010.

• THREE – No side panes

  Starting with Office XP, the Microsoft introduced side panes to the MSO. OO does not have the side panes. The closest OO has to the side panes are docked and/ or floating windows for the Navigator Styles and the formatting, Gallery, Function Wizard and Data Source Explorer. If your users insist on having sidebars in OO you could open the equivalent floating window click on it is title bar and drag it to the side of the OO window until you see a dark outline where the window could dock.

• TWO – Starting with Office XP, the Microsoft introduced side panes

  to the MSO. OO does not have the side panes. The closest OO has to the side panes are docked and/ or floating windows for the Navigator Styles and the formatting, Gallery, Function Wizard and Data Source Explorer. If your users insist on having sidebars in OO you could open the equivalent floating window click on it is title bar and drag it to the side of the OO window until you see a dark outline where the window could dock.

• ONE –  Tool for tool, feature for feature

  One thing that always surprises new-to-OO-users is that the open source suite does contain just about every feature they are used to using – and more. You would want to show the new users where all of the Open Office tools are: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base. And once they see where all the tools are, show them that generally Open Office mimics MSO feature for feature. Keyboard short cut is similar, menu entries are similar and spreadsheet formulas are similar.

In Office 2010, the same flexibility could often be achieved in other ways allowing you to greatly reduce the number of templates that need to be managed. How significant the changes are depends on whether you are migrating from the Office 2007 or an older version.