Office Tips from a Microsoft Partner Presentation

Just spent half a day at a Microsoft Resellers’ Roadshow – included some very informative presentations on Vista, Office and SharePoint. Even the licencing presentation was clear (others such presentation I have attended in the past have certainly been lacking clarity, due in a large part from the complexity of the programs. Well done to Carlos Martinez for that!).

A couple of little tips that came from the seminars;

• The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) is a handy tool for converting Office 2003 documents to OpenXML format. That conversion is not necessary for using those documents in Office 2007, of course, but it could be useful for reducing document sizes. Also can just be convenient for business analysis work, to determine the number of Office documents stored by a company – could also be used, I guess, in capacity planning exercises in calculating the size of document stores to be indexed by SharePoint search. The presenter gave an example of what to expect in terms of performance from that tool – it took 2 hours to analyse 16,000 documents for him. Note that it does not have to carry out the conversion, and can be used just for the analysis.
• Group Schedules in Outlook can be a great time saver. They allow the schedules for a set of individuals and resources to be saved as a group for easy reuse when scheduling across this same combination of people and resources (outlined here).
• Check the suitability of Vista on PCs across a network using the Application Compatibility Toolkit.