Prepare your working environment with MS Office 2010

With template identification/migration and the training plan well under way, one would believe the next step would be to start worrying about the application program and rollout plan, but with a program as far-reaching as Office that would still be jumping the gun. One has to be sure that the environment itself is prepared for Office 2010.

Ensuring your environment is ready for Office.com/setup is not a simple question to ask of several things will affect the answer that isn't evident at first glance. In many organizations, there are plenty of individual pieces that interact with the Office Suite. Sometimes these applications even fall outside of traditional IT as they may be driven by individuals or small user groups within the organization.

Office-Dependent Applications

In most of the organizations I have been involved with, the Office Application Suite has scarcely stood alone. There have always been applications which have been entirely dependent due to their very functionality on the Office Suite, and many of these have significant relevance to the overall workflow of the underlying organization.

Contract Management Programs

Document Creation Wizards

Contact Sync/CRM Programs

Resource Scheduling Programs

E-Mail Archival Programs

Background-based PDA sync software

When looking for these, it truly is often helpful to think of applications that directly interact with contacts, calendars, user mailboxes, or documents. Whatever shape these applications take or function they play in your environment, they can be likely a considerable part of the workflow for at least one group in your organization. Like it or not, these applications need certainly to be investigated, tested, and remediated with the new platform before any considerable end-user trials will manage to begin. These applications may even have until they can be addressed the business impact potential which could delay closing rollout of the Office platform.

Office-Impacted Applications

In many organizations, there can also be types of applications that, while not dependent on Office, are substantially influenced by changes in the Office Suite. Examples of this kind of program would be:

Email Filtering Programs

Anti-Virus Applications

Document Search Systems

Phone/PDA document viewing/editing applications

Don't discount the impact of these requests, especially if you are migrating from Office 2003 or before. Even so, difficulties in this class of programs are unlikely to halt migrations from occurring as you can find commonly comparatively simple workarounds including the use of the legacy file formats.

Workstation Environment

Even without considering the space requirements of other supporting materials or templates, most of the various Office Application Suites require more than 3GB of free disk space to be able to install /operate. Finding 3GB of disk space on a brand new or perhaps freshly imaged legacy machine is usually no difficulty.

For those with a management system including SCCM, finding these devices is a comparatively straightforward thing. There continue to be options like setting a disk space scan in the login script of the organization.

If you locate a substantial variety of machines with disk space issues, don't fret. Some items can be done to help clean up workstation disk space without impacting end user behavior:

Cleaning TEMP folders

Group Policy

Office 2010 is fully manageable via Group Policy, as has been the case with the previous versions of Office. I like to work though the details so that I could mirror the settings in the program package of how I want the initial GPO settings to appear before starting the application program that is actual. This permits the applications to be configured, and nearly completely setup without the need of a Group Policy upgrade, even for the remote worker community.

The GPO template files can be downloaded from here. Ensure that you look at the Settings Benchmark Spreadsheet. There are a significant number of changes to the policies for Office 2010 from preceding versions. The spreadsheet has been updated, has been removed, and contains different tabs to help one identify what's new.

Additional Tools to Assist the Planning Procedure

Additionally, you will want to download the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) from Microsoft. This set of instruments will help in the process of identifying likely problems in your environment including items like VBA or 64 -bit OS incompatibilities. This is a measure that is necessary as the other remediation things mentioned before are all program-based. These tools will allow you to look at your existing file inventory to identify hazards within the files. Additionally, there is a volume file conversion tool to convert scores of documents in the legacy binary formats to the new XML -based formats for organizations that want to accomplish that.