John Quirk's Blog

We’re working on an Office 2010 deployment for a customer, so, naturally, the first thing to do is put In Configuration Manager. Having successfully deployed the hierarchy and installed the Configuration Manager agent across all the workstations we have a requirement to assess the compatibility of plugins to the current Office 2003 estate.

The tool for the job is the Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT)

Using the “Settings Wizard” we can create an unattended package deployable with Configuration Manager. This package results in a load of XML files deposited onto a shared folder. These, when interrogated with the OEAT creates an Excel report:

These add-ins are then broken down into those supplied with Office vs 3rd Party add-ins. Along with raw data and hardware configuration (including graphs!).

As an answer to “what plug-ins do I have out there”, this is a neat solution.