I think anyone hoping the new films will pay *any* attention whatsoever to the EU is going to be sorely disappointed. At best there may just be a scant few cherry picked events ro characters that they might hold on to, but other than that, good luck!
Not a huge loss IMO. I stopped reading the EU books around the time New Rebellion & The Crystal Star came out, so I realise I've missed a tone of stuff, but from what I hear the ratio of quality material to time wasting dreck is even lower than it used to be. As far as the stories focused on the movie characters go, the only books that were any good were the Zahn and Stackpole novels.
I also don't subscribe to the inexplicably popular notion that the Thrawn trilogy is perfect material for a straight up screen adaptation. It quite simply is not. Those books are written as a single story broken into three volumes, not a trilogy of independent yet thematically connected stories. What's more, as befitting a novel, they're very light on action. That's fine because generally speaking, action on page can be shockingly dull. There's also an awful lot of pottering about and not doing an awful lot in those books and the main characters spend most of the time simply reacting to, or often just watching what the more interesting antagonist is doing next.
