Microsoft has just announced new tools to support the application compatibility readiness for Office 365 Pro Plus. Over the next year, the intention is to roll out tools to catalogue all of an organisation’s add-ins, in order to assess the status of VBA applications and to deliver an improved support for 64-bit VBA.

Microsoft is making a big push to move businesses in particular to an Office 365 Pro Plus platform, so that users may take full advantage of features such as Power Pivot and Power Query (Get & Transform). In response, customers have fed back that for this to work, there must be application compatibility to make upgrade less problematic. With this borne in mind, Microsoft is releasing a limited preview now. If you are interested in being part of the preview, email Microsoft directly at ReadyForOffice@microsoft.com.

The new tools we are creating for application compatibility include:

• Updates to the Office Telemetry Dashboard
• New tools for add-in readiness reporting
• 64-bit common control support
• Office add-in reporting in Windows Upgrade Analytics

In addition to supporting internal add-ins and VBA applications, Microsoft will also be adding more readiness information for Office add-ins from third party independent software vendors (ISVs). Later this year, a searchable list of ISVs who already support Office 365 Pro Plus will be released and that will mean – good news for all – that this will kick-start the validation of popular third party add-ins in the new Office builds (yay!).

For more details, check out the Microsoft Tech Community article here.