Since
announcing our public Beta, many folks on the Office team have been hard at work engaging with pre-release testers to find and fix any potential deployment issues IT departments may face with existing Office solutions once Office 2010 is released. In addition to engaging on specific developer features like
UI extensibility, we also started the Office 2010 Application Compatibility Program – here are excerpts from
this blog post:
With the great value Office 2010 brings for end users, IT Professionals and Developers, we are also investing heavily in making deployment of the new version of Office easier. As part of our focus on deployment, we have renewed priority on helping ensure applications and Add-ins for existing installations of Office continue to work without hangs, crashed or performance degradation when interfacing with Office 2010.
…The compatibility program will provide tools for environment assessment, code scanning and remediation assistance, and an update to the document conversion tools introduced with Office 2007. The tools, guidance and services we are delivering will be the most comprehensive we have provided to date for a new release of Office.
Now that we are getting closer to release, we wanted to double down and keep the great feedback coming, so we’ve started the Office 2010 Application Compatibility Tools Bug Hunt, with prizes for those who help us find bugs. Official rules and all the details in the linked post, but here’s a quick excerpt: To win the prizes, all you need to do is to download beta of the Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT) and beta of the Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector, run them and report any bugs you discover to ofappcpt@microsoft.com before April 9th. If we are able to reproduce your bug or you can help us identify a defect in the tools, that becomes your sweepstakes entry. From the submitted and approved bugs, we will randomly select winners after April 9th.
Happy Hunting!
