Using Office 2007 Applications with SharePoint 2010

Microsoft offers a thorough guide on this topic, with 41 pages dedicated to the various versions of Office and the level of integration provided with SharePoint 2010: “SharePoint_2010_and_Office_2010_Business_Productivity_at_its_Best_Whitepaper.docx.” This guide offers a detailed comparison of the user experience when Office 2007 products are used with SharePoint 2010 and when Office 2010 products are used with SharePoint 2010.

The following is a partial list from that white paper of the features that users won’t get if using Office 2007 with SharePoint 2010. IT should find this useful to help determine whether any of these features would justify or help justify and upgrade to Office 2010 products.

Features available only with Office 2010 applications and SharePoint 2010 include the following:

• Coauthor documents and presentations— Word 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 offer the coauthoring capability that allows multiple people to work on one of these documents at the same time. Note that this is different from the ability in Office web applications to have multiple users work on the same spreadsheet at the same time.

• Simultaneously edit spreadsheets and notebooks— Excel 2010 and OneNote 2010 documents can be edited by multiple people simultaneously. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 27. Excel 2010 takes advantage of Excel Services and Office web apps, whereas OneNote provides this functionality natively and doesn’t require Office web apps.

• Broadcast slide shows in PowerPoint 2010— Another feature offered by Office web apps, this takes advantage of a SharePoint 2010 broadcast site, which is automatically created by Office web apps, which allows users to view a PowerPoint slide show without having PowerPoint on their desktops or using LiveMeeting, WebEx, or similar technology. This is covered in Chapter 27.

• Office Backstage view— This is available in Office 2010 applications when a user clicks the File tab and has access to the Backstage tools. This File tab is functionally the replacement for the Microsoft Office button.

• Access SharePoint templates— The New Document Wizard in Office 2010 applications enables users to select SharePoint templates that have been used previously.

• Apply PowerPoint templates to SharePoint sites— PowerPoint themes can be applied to SharePoint sites for basic customization and branding.

The following features are partially supported with Office 2007 applications:

• Office Backstage view with Excel 2010— This allows for selective publication of parts of a worksheet, to hide formulas, and “stage” data to SharePoint 2010. This can be done in Excel 2007, but the process is less intuitive.

• Integration with Groove and SharePoint Workspace products— SharePoint Workspace 2010 is the new version of the Groove product and provides powerful features for mobile workers, but Groove 2007 users will still have the ability to work offline with SharePoint 2010 document libraries.