New WhitePaper on SharePoint and Office Integration, Different Versions

At long last!  A much-awaited whitepaper has been released by Microsoft detailing how different versions of Office work with current (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) SharePoint technologies.

In my experience with customers and prospective customers as the latest SharePoint technologies have hit the market, a concern that gets surfaced early in any discussion about SharePoint is how it will work with the version of Office on users' desktops.  This whitepaper does a nice job of summarizing how SharePoint integration differs depending on what version of Office is being used, classifying the integrations as:

• "fair" integration with Office 2000
• "good" integration with Office XP
• "better" integration with Office 2003
• "best" integration with Office 2007,

and detailing features in each. 

In a decidedly unscientific poll, most SharePoint customers to whom we've spoken envision migrating to SharePoint on the server first, then upgrading users' Office versions, then upgrading users' desktop operating systems to Vista.  They perceive this to be the least disruptive approach, and I would generally agree but would counsel IT leaders to also consider incremental benefits of new integration features. 

For example: Your organization has a problem organizing PowerPoint content that could be solved by implementing MOSS 2007 and using slide libraries to manage that content more effectively.  I'd recommend upgrading key PowerPoint users' desktops to Office 2007 concurrently with upgrading to MOSS 2007 to take advantage of this.