The following diagram shows the tasks involved for planning an upgrade to Office 2010. For this article, “Office 2010” includes the Office 2010 suites, Microsoft Project 2010, and Microsoft Visio 2010. Also, “Project 2010” includes Microsoft Project Standard 2010 and Microsoft Project Professional 2010.

The process of upgrading to Office 2010 consists of two primary tasks:

• Install Office 2010.

• Migrate the user data, such as user and computer settings and documents that were created from the previously installed version of Microsoft Office.

When you plan an upgrade strategy, first decide on the best option for upgrading to Office 2010 in your organization. The upgrade type helps determine the available choices for data migration and how data migration is performed.

There are three options for upgrading to Office 2010:

• In-place upgrade   The earlier version of Office, such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system, is already installed on computers.

• Uninstall-upgrade   The earlier version of Office, such as the 2007 Office system, is first uninstalled before the upgrade to Office 2010.

• New operating system upgrade   The computers get a new version of the operating system, such as Windows 7, and an upgrade to Office 2010.

Important:
We do not recommend the In-place upgrade option for enterprise customers. We strongly recommend the Uninstall-upgrade option instead. For information about how to perform the Uninstall-install option, see the Uninstall-install option section in Deploy different Office 2010 suites.

The following table lists the upgrade options and describes how the migration of the user and computer settings data occurs.

Upgrade option	Migration of user and computer settings data
In-place upgrade	Migration is performed during installation of Office 2010. Important: We do not recommend this option for enterprise customers.
Uninstall-upgrade	Migration is performed during first use of each Office 2010 application. Important: We strongly recommend this upgrade option for enterprise customers.
New operating system upgrade	Migration is performed after the new operating system and Office 2010 are installed.

Migration of data to Office 2010 includes both the user and computer settings and the documents that were created from earlier versions of Office. For a list of the registry keys that are migrated, see User registry settings to migrate to Office 2010.

The documents that were created from the previously installed version of Office remain on the computers in their current formats and can be migrated or converted, as needed, at another time if an in-place upgrade or uninstall upgrade is used. When you perform a new operating system upgrade, you must move the documents from the source computers to a migration store before you install the new operating system. After that, you upgrade the computers to Office 2010.

After you decide on the best option for the organization, you have to determine the best migration strategy for the documents that were created by using earlier versions of Office.

Important:
Migration to Office 2010 is now supported by using either the User State Migration Tool (USMT) version 4.0, or the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=159061). For more information about the USMT version 4.0, see Use the User State Migration Tool 4.0 to migrate to Office 2010.

The following diagram shows the tasks involved in planning to migrate documents to Office 2010.

These tasks are further defined in the following steps:

1. Review changes and migration considerations   When you plan your document migration, first review changes to the Office 2010 applications that you plan to install, such as what is new, changed, or removed. Then review any application-specific migration considerations. For more information, see Product and feature changes in Office 2010 (for ITPros).

2. Plan file format support   After you review the changes and migration considerations, determine a strategy for file format support after you upgrade to Office 2010. For more information, see FAQ: File format (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=166107).

3. Assess by using OMPM   Finally, use the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) to examine the files in your environment, and then and decide whether to

   • archive them

   • convert them in bulk by using the Office File Converter available in OMPM, or

   • convert them manually