By Rob Helm [bio]
Posted: Dec. 4, 2006

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

The Migration Planning Manager delivers tools to help plan file migration to Office 2007. The tools include a scanner that identifies existing Office files on a computer and a central reporting tool that can combine scanner results from multiple computers and give organizations an overall picture of the files that might be affected by migration. The scanner can be deployed to desktops en masse by Systems Management Server or a similar tool, and its scanning behavior can be customized by a simple configuration file.

In the report shown here, the scanner has performed a deep scan, which not only locates existing Office files but also reports on whether the files will work properly in Office 2007. One Word 2003 file shown here has been flagged "red" because it uses a feature (multiple document versions in the file) that is not supported by Office 2007.