The New Generation

This section describes the overall picture of MS Office Server 2007 products. The objective here is to show you what new programs come with the latest generation of Microsoft Office products and to give you a good idea of the new features in SharePoint. Below is a list of the new or updated products that were officially released by early 2007:

• q MS Windows SharePoint Service 2007

• q MS Office SharePoint Server 2007

• q MS Word 2007

• q MS Excel 2007

• q MS PowerPoint 2007

• q MS Access 2007

• q MS Outlook 2007

• q MS Publisher 2007

• q MS InfoPath 2007

• q MS OneNote 2007

• q MS Project Server 2007

• q MS Office Project Portfolio Server 2007

• q MS SharePoint Designer 2007

• q MS Expression Web Designer 2007

• q MS Office Groove 2007

• q MS Visio 2007

• q MS Office Forms Server 2007

There were also several interesting products that were released at the end of 2005 that are totally compatible with the 2007 product line, such as MS SQL Server 2005, MS Dynamics CRM 3.0, MS Communicator, and MS Business Scorecard Manager. As you can see from this list, Microsoft has been very busy the last few years. Their challenge is not only to develop a new version but also to make it integrate with other products and especially SharePoint 2007. So, now it's just up to us to learn all these products. But then again, how hard can it be, right?

One of Microsoft's top priorities for this new version of SharePoint is performance. The goal is to offer even better performance than with SharePoint 2003, and all initial tests indicate that this is the case. As long as you follow the recommended guidelines for building a SharePoint farm (see Chapters 2 and 4), the performance of SharePoint 2007 will greatly surpass what you have today, and this is especially important for large organizations with large farms.

Due to the increased number of products, the number of different MS Office suites has grown to seven. When you want to upgrade to the new Office 2007 version, you have a lot of options to choose between. All of them can use either MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 or MS Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

However, only MS Office Enterprise, Ultimate, or Professional Pro will enable full integration with SharePoint 2007, since only these editions include MS InfoPath, which is necessary to display the new Document Information Panel for MS Office documents. The new features in SharePoint 2007 are integrated into the Office 2007 products, when appropriate, but you will still be able to use a web browser to take advantage of most of these features if you are running pre–Office 2007 applications.

Open table as spreadsheet

Application	MS Office Enterprise 2007	MS Office Ultimate	MS Office Professional Pro	MS Office Professional
Excel 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Word 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
PowerPoint 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Outlook 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Access 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
InfoPath 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Publisher 2007	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
OneNote	Yes	Yes	No	No
Groove 2007	Yes	Yes	No	No
Communicator 2007	Yes	No	Yes	No

The three first packages, MS Office Enterprise 2007, MS Office Ultimate 2007, and MS Office Professional Plus 2007, have extra functionality built in that will allow them to do more in a MOSS 2007 environment; these features are called Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Rights Management Service (RMS). These extra features will allow a user to publish a spreadsheet directly from MS Excel 2007 to the Excel Services in MOSS 2007. You can also apply special security permissions to a document using RMS, and then store it in a SharePoint document library, for example that this document can only be displayed but not printed or saved. These settings will still be active, even if someone is copying this document to another location or maybe sending it as an e-mail attachment. Using RMS, you can also use a client certificate to electronically sign a document; this information will follow the document wherever it may be stored. If anyone then modifies this document, the Office application will display a warning whenever the document is opened that the electronic signature is invalid, and therefore its content cannot be trusted. To get these RMS features, an administrator must first install the RMS server in your network.

Important 

For more information about RMS, check http://www.microsoft.com/rms. For more information about ECM, see Chapter 9.

Besides the four MS Office editions listed in the previous table, there are several other editions available:

• q Microsoft Office Small Business 2007

• q Microsoft Office Standard 2007

• q Microsoft Office Home 2007

• q Microsoft Office Student 2007

• q Microsoft Office Basic 2007

As noted earlier in this section, you won't have the full functionality of integration with these products.

Now that you have examined the various Office versions and suites, it is time to move on to some practical and fun things that you can do with Office 2007, starting with Outlook.