Today’s guest writer is Shawn Sullivan from the Office Shared team. I have asked him to talk about the work he has done to help organizations move to newer versions of Office.
In March, we made a post about Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), which is a suite of tools to help analyze your environment for migration to
Office 2007. Its primary function is to scan Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access files in the Office 97-2003 binary file format, and provide analysis of any issues those files might experience being converted to the
Office 2007 OOXML format, as well as any possible issues those files might exhibit simply being used in
Office 2007.
OMPM provides you with several techniques you can leverage specifically concerning migrating to Access 2007. Here’s a short list of how the tool can help you plan for migrating to Access 2007:
Identify files are in your environment
As the March post mentioned, OMPM can be used as a file inventory tool to identify all Access files (as well as Word, Excel,
Office 2007 Enterprise, and PowerPoint) in your organization. Both the light and deep scan modes can accomplish this task.
Analyze Access files for issues
OMPM’s deep scan mode will actually crack open files from Access 95-2003 and scan them for potential migration issues. The full list of issues as well as pointers to documentation are at the bottom of this post.
Develop plans to deal with issues
OMPM can generate reports from scan data which show you what migration issues are present where in your environment. In combination with OMPM documentation, this allows you to test and plan for migration.
OMPM can be downloaded here so you can try it out and see what it can do to help assess your Access 2007 migration. It requires no installation, although SQL 2000, 2005, or 2005 Express are required. SQL 2005 Express is available for free to help you get started looking at OMPM, and works well for smaller (<100,000 files) scan analysis.
Screenshots and error details
Here’s a few shots of OMPM reports (personally identifiable data obscured). First, a report showing all scanned files and any issues found:
And second, a closeup of a report listing all issues found in a scan, and their frequency:
Finally, here’s a list of the errors OMPM can generate about Access files.
IssueID
IssueText
UserIntervention
IssueType
1
Too many code or class modules
Required
Error
2
Sort order and system language do not match
Likely
Warning
3
Replicated database
Required
Warning
4
Database is an MDE file
Required
Error
5
DAO 2.5/3.5 compatibility layer
None
Note
6
Microsoft Jet SQL help
None
Note
7
Additional References
Likely
Warning
8
Missing References
Likely
Warning
9
Reserved Name in Form/Report/Macro
None
Note
10
Linked Tables
Unlikely
Warning
11
Database in uncompiled state
None
Note
12
Backup database
None
Note
13
Sample database
None
Note
14
Old Database
None
Note
15
Secured Database: User Level Security
Likely
Error
16
Secured Database: Database Password
Likely
Error
17
System Database
None
Note
18
Unsupported legacy format
Likely
Warning
19
Unsupported legacy format - forms, reports, and modules will be lost
Required
Error
Errors 1-17 are the complete list of errors which can be generated by the Access Conversion Toolkit, OMPM’s predecessor. Documentation for 1-17 can be found in the Access Conversion Toolkit. The documentation is Flash-based and requires the installation of the toolkit from here.
Errors 18 and 19 are new to OMPM and mean
18 – Access 2007 no longer opens files created in Access 2.0.
19 – Access 2007 will open a file that was created in Access 95, but will not read its forms, reports, or modules.
Summary and links
Here are links to useful sites with more info on OMPM:
OMPM core documentation OMPM wiki List of migration considerations by application Access 2007 migration considerations Changes in Access 2007 OMPM download
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section of this post or on the wiki. And if you have helpful tips of your own about OMPM, please share them on the wiki!
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