We’re looking to upgrade a set of workstations from older versions of Office to the latest Office 2019 and we’re trying to do an assessment of upgrade readiness. A consultant from Microsoft has insisted that we use SCCM’s Window’s Analytics which would involve us distributing the SCCM Agent throughout the enterprise as well deploying the supporting infrastructure. Ideally we’d like to avoid that.
Are there any other options we could use in BigFix? Have any other folks developed solutions or processes for using BigFix to determine Office upgrade readiness?
I would avoid SCCM like the plague. If your computers are newer than 6 years old, they’re ready for O365. Best to use the ODT to deploy and CDN to keep up to date. Your XML file used with the ODT can uninstall old Office apps and install the new stuff in one pass. At least this is how I do it.
As for assuming our computers are ready for O365, I probably can’t make that assumption. Just looking at a few alpha test cases I’ve found out that installations of Visio 2016 or Project 2016 actually block the installation, and they have to be uninstalled first. Apparently that has something to do with the way Click-To-Run is being implemented in the new Office 365/2019 package.
I have found one tool that can help with determining VBA and Plug-in Readiness:
That looks like something we should be able to use in a BigFix fixlet to run silently on target users and collect results that can be analyzed.
Additionally we should be able to use the “Installed Applications - Windows” property in the “Application Information (Windows)” analysis to get the list of currently installed programs. That won’t tell us about Office 2019 upgrade incompatibilities, but we can use the list to determine issues with known incompatible programs.
Does anyone else have any experience or would have other recommendations?
The ODT and XML will do all that. Here’s the XML for my Office deployment via BigFix. I’m just running the ODT (setup.exe) and the XML file. You can see it will remove any MSI installs, then install the C2R, which is what you want.
