Hi Everyone,

I'm after some insight here hoping someone has already investigated this or even better if IBM can respond regarding how PAFE is designed please?

So we are currently a 32bit MS Office outfit, but there are one or two outliers using 64bit Office and I'm sure that at some point everyone else will get moved over. We only use 32bit PAFE at the moment.

What i want to know is:

Are all the supporting xml files in the users "AppData\Local\Cognos\Office Connection" folder the same irrespective of using 32bit or 64bit PAFE? So same files and same content? Or what differs?

Why i want to know is that we deploy config setting updates (e.g. we replace some of the xmls on a period basis with recommended or new settings), and we do this for all users based on our recommended PAFE 32bit config.

If the xml files/setup is different for PAFE64 then that might cause problems for future PAFE64 users.

I could of course test all this myself but that would require me getting hold of a 64bit Office machine which i don't have, and if the answer is the config is incompatible then there would be no point in looking into it further at this point in time. But if its the same config then we could tentatively start trialling the 64bit version with these users.

Thanks in advance

the configuration files are bitness agnostic.

if you've customized any settings specifically for a 32bit footprint, you may want to reevaluate those.  other thing i would say, is there is an opportunity when pushing configs to do some other cleanup to the user profile - ex: purging the webview directory. it should not be required though.

i would generally encourage all organizations to move towards 64bit office, these days.

Hi Ted, appreciate the confirmation - thanks.

Yes 64bit office is likely on the horizon for us which is what interested me in getting a couple of early adopters with it using PAFE 64bit if we could. 

Our capability is limited to deploying updates within the office connection folder that PAFE uses at the moment. If there is any advice on purging webview relating to PAFE please let me know as its not something we were aware of.

Thanks again,
Mike