USMT 4 Update Released to Support Office 2010 Migrations, Fix Other Goo

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Hi, David here. Some of you may have noticed that if you tried to migrate Office 2010 settings using USMT 4.0, the results were often less than ideal. Without going into a very long and ultimately meaningless explanation, this happened because USMT 4.0 didn’t have any of the information needed to know where Office 2010 expected its data to be. Office 2010 is different enough from its predecessors that USMT does need to have that information in order to be able to handle the settings.

Fortunately, I have good news: we have created an update for USMT 4.0 that adds support for Office 2010. USMT 4.0 migrations of Office 2010 are now supported .

You can get the update here: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023591

Here are some things you should be aware of:

  • Certain settings and customizations in MS Word won’t migrate from any version to Word 2010, because of with the way Word is designed and how data is stored in “HKEY_CURRENT_USERsoftwareMicrosoftOffice<OfficeVersion>WordData".
  • Many Office settings (across all Office apps) won’t migrate when going from 32-bit Office to 64-bit Office. This is due to the way that the settings are stored in 64-bit Office installations.
  • If you’ve launched Office on the destination PC as a user before doing the migration of that user’s profile, most of your settings won’t migrate. This happens because Office relies on some code that only runs the first time that an Office app is launched to migrate settings.
  • This update isn’t a magic bullet. You may still need to do some customization to make USMT fit your particular configuration.

The update also fixes a couple of issues around hard-link migration performance when copying a folder with a huge number of files and an issue that affected certain time zones.

If you’re doing a migration, make sure you’ve allotted plenty of time for testing and customization, and if you do need help from us, get it early so that you have time to make adjustments to what you’re doing before you start running into deadlines. Make sure you read the KB fully before pinging us!

That said, go get the update. Then go forth and migrate.

- David “Clippy” Beach