Migrated from Snow Leopard to Lion -- Nice!
Today I migrated to a new work laptop. Always exciting, especially when you’re also upgrading to a new OS version. In this case, I moved from Snow Leopard to Lion.
Yes, I actually was excited.
Shut up.
In addition to being excited, I was also prepared for a royally painful migration, since every migration I’ve ever done was royally painful. However, I’m happy to report that in this case, it was (almost) dead simple. As simple as it should always have been. Thank you, Apple.
It was only almost dead simple because I did hit a couple of snafus, but they were both issues with Microsoft Office, not with the OS X Migration Proper. I’ve detailed them below for posterity. (And Google searchers.)
Outlook Default Identity
After migration, my Microsoft Outlook 2011 search was acting up. (More accurately, still acting up — see below.) All outlook searches were returning “No Results”, even when I was looking at messages that I knew matched my search. Clearly, something was up.
I’ve got that sinking feeling again.
After a little research, I discovered that Outlook for Mac search is powered by Spotlight. Huh. Didn’t see that coming.
Anyway, I quickly tried a spotlight search for email messages, and — lo and behold — it worked!
I’ve lost that sinking feeling! Also, the Apple version worked. I’m shocked.
I tried to open one of those files via Outlook, and it told me it couldn’t open it because “the message was not associated with the default identity”.
Wait… I’ve got that sinking feeling again.
I opened the containing folder in Finder — /Users/aboothe/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities on my machine — and checked the status bar for the full path, and found that the message appeared to be owned by Main Identity [Backed up 2012-04-07 08.54.00]. That looked a little suspicious, since that’s the date I did my migration, so I did a little more research and found out that while Office (or Outlook, it really seems to be) supports multiple “identities” — think home versus work here — it always starts using the default identity, and it can’t open files from other identities. Also, the only way to switch identities is to change the default identity is in the Microsoft Database Utility (pictured below), which must then be followed by a restart of Office applications.
Fancy.
I won’t comment on the user experience of this approach.
I made sure the right Main Identity was chosen by using Right Click —> Set as Default, which triggered a “Rebuild Database” step that took a little while. Afterwards, emails from the wrong Main Identity were still showing up in Spotlight, so I deleted the bad identity in Finder and asked Spotlight to reindex the Office 2011 Identities folder to make sure it dropped the deleted emails and found the ones from the “real” identity.
Once Spotlight was done reindexing, Outlook Search was happy again. Mission accomplished.
Note: I had issues with Outlook search before I did my migration, so that is likely to be at least a component of the issue, if not the outright cause. However, the fix is still interesting, so I’ve dropped it in here.
Excel MicrosoftFBA Framework
After all that was sorted out, I tried to do a little work in Microsoft Excel 2011 that I’d fallen behind on, only to find that it wouldn’t start.
Bummer.
After asking to see the report about why, it seemed to be because a framework MicrosoftFBA called wasn’t loading. (More specifically, it was complaining that it couldn’t load library /MicrosoftFBA.framework/Versions/14/MicrosoftFBA, for all you Googlewhackers out there.)
I had a hunch that this might just be an issue where, out of a gajillion frameworks that Microsoft Office needs to copy over during a migration, one just got forgotten and left behind. Fortunately, I still have my other computer up and running, so I just hopped over to my old machine, found the offending framework (/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/MicrosoftFBA.framework), and copied it to the same location on my new machine. I fired up Excel, and I was back in business.
Also — Lion Seems Pretty Sweet
So far so good. Really digging the UI updates — really clean — and also looking forward to trying a couple of the betas, like iMessage. Of course, I’m upgrading just in time to upgrade again to Mountain Lion in a few months, but I’ll take it for now.
