Visual Studio Tools for Office Vagueness
The following link ( http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/prodinfo/functionality.mspx ) points out that you must have Office 2003 Pro to install Visual Studio Tools for Office. What is unclear from the documentation, and from various blogs and newgroups postings that I've read is whether or not Office 2003 Pro is a required environment to deploy a solution developed with Visual Studio Tools for Office.
My compadre and I have been working on a Word document project for awhile now, and are getting ready to make the project available to the users--but our test installations have all failed. The only difference between their machines and ours that we've been able to isolate is that their machines have Office 2003 Standard Edition installed. Understand, we're not trying to install "Visual Studio Tools for Office"--we're trying to make available some data-driven templates developed using VSTO to users that have Office 2003 Standard Edition on their machines.
UPDATE:
My own link does in fact answer my question--that's what I get for skimming :). For the record, it is true that any users of solutions built by VSTO must also have Office 2003 Pro. I guess my last question is---"WHY?!?!?!" It doesn't make sense! In most organizations I've been in, Office Pro was reserved for developers--standard users were given Standard Edition--VSTO wouldn't be very useful if programs generated from it can only be used by other developers. It's analagous to saying that the only people that could run soluctions built by Visual Studio are people that have Visual Studio--i.e., developers. Perhaps there's an angle to this that I'm missing, and I hope someone will tell me if there is--but this doesn't make sense to me.