21 flavors and nothing on
Confused over Office 2007 capabilities and SharePoint? Some of us are, but hopefully we can make some things a little clearer with this.
Okay, brace yourselves. Now that Office 2007 has RTM (released to manufacturing) and will be available for download for business customers on November 16th (some versions are now available on MSDN downloads) there's the question of what version does what (as it pertains to SharePoint).
As of right now, there are 8 different SKUs for Office. They are:
- Basic
- Home & Student
- Standard
- Small Business
- Professional
- Ultimate
- Professional Plus
- Enterprise
What's even more confusing is what can you do with each one (and more importantly what you can't do). Still even more confusing (I'll never understand Microsoft Marketing) is that Enterprise (the top of the line SKU) doesn't include Outlook with the Business Contact Manager (a pretty neat feature). You only get the standard Outlook client. The next version downscale from Enterprise that includes the contact manager is Ultimate (Professional Plus doesn't have it either). Rather strange as Pro Plus is like Enterprise but without OneNote or Groove, but doesn't include the contact manager. Again, I'll never understand the marketing guys.
One of the cooler new features of Office 2007 is the Document Information Panel (DIP). This is the grown up version of the File Properties dialog box you get with 2003 but has so much more like workflow and customization. It basically presents whatever metadata your document contains in a nice InfoPath-like form at the top of document. The Document Information Panel helps address a major challenge facing organizations: ensuring that documents are tagged with the appropriate metadata to make them easy to find, discover, and manage over their entire lifecycle.
In the 2007 edition of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, the properties in the DIP can be automatically synchronized with the backend system (SharePoint) so things list values are pulled down, synced, and kept up to date. And in Word the properties can sync with the document content itself. Additionally the Information Panel can also respect (and kickoff) workflows hooked up to its fields so it's a pretty powerful tool overall.
The Document Information Panel is completely customizable and you can even build your own. You can check out this Channel 9 video on creating your own custom DIPs (don't you just love that acronym?) here.
As the panel is pretty much an InfoPath form (behind the scenes) and a local InfoPath installation is required to see this gem as well as the right version of Office. Yup, you heard me right. You need either Ultimate, Professional Plus, or Enterprise to get this goody. The new run-of-the-mill Professional (which you think would be for oh, say, professionals) version just doesn't have it. Sucks to be a pro now eh? We all have to be Pro+ now.
Of course, you always (in any flavor) have the Office "Jewel" (gak I really hate that term) which lets you access the "old-style" document properites like so:
However there's no workflow here, dropdown lists are limited and some properties won't (read: can't) show up here. Values will make it back to SharePoint but it's as basic as it gets here and pretty much what you get in 2003.
There's a matrix of what's what in each version here on Microsoft which should help muddle through the confusion. There's also an update of the "Good, Better, Best" whitepaper (2003 version here) on 2007 and integration features coming soon from Lawrence Liu (whose blog you should subscribe to as he has lots of great SharePoint goodies).
You'll still be able to create new documents, open them, checkin/out, etc. with 2007 and SharePoint but as you slip down the scale in flavors (and regress back to the 2003 version) you'll continue to loose functionality and integration but the basics will always be there.