Today, I am working on a scoping document on SharePoint 2007 Intranet re-development project for a client who has Office 2003 as part of the Standard Operating Environment (SOE). I found myself wandering in Google for some information on how SharePoint 2007 integrates with Office 2003. It looks like there isn’t much information on listing various integration options. But I found the “Fair, Good, Better, Best” white paper very helpful in understanding various integration options with different office versions.
The increasing levels of functional capabilities have been deemed “fair” for Office 2000, “good” for Office XP, “better” for the Office 2003 Editions, and “best” for the 2007 Office Suites in terms of how they work together with SharePoint.In a nut shell;
| Feature | Office 2000 | Office XP | Office 2003 Editions |
| Save and open files from SharePoint sites | Yes (Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, Word) | Yes (Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, Visio, Word) | Enhanced (Excel, FrontPage, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, Publisher, Visio, Word) |
| Create new documents in Web browser | No | Yes (Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Word) | Yes (Excel, FrontPage, InfoPath, PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, Publisher, Word) |
| Collect metadata automatically | No | No | Enhanced (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) |
| Promote and demote file properties and metadata automatically | Data stored, but not displayed (Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Word) | Yes (Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Word) | Enhanced (Excel, FrontPage, InfoPath, PowerPoint, Visio, Word) |
| Track document versions | No. Use Web browser to view and manage document versions. | No. Use Web browser to view and manage document versions. | Enhanced (Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Word) |
| Check-out and check-in documents | No. Use Web browser to manually check-out and check-in documents. | No. Use Web browser to manually check-out and check-in documents. | Enhanced (Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Word). Use Web browser to manually check-out and check-in other types of documents. |
| Manage Microsoft Project documents, risks, and issues | No | No | Yes |
| Upload multiple documents | No | No | Yes |
| Inline discussions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Office Components for SharePoint | No | No | Yes |
| Person Names Smart Tag | No | No | Yes |
| Integration with Microsoft Business Solutions | No | No | Yes |
Download the white paper here.
[...] SharePoint 2007 integration options with Various Microsoft Office versions [...]
Pingback by SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff : SharePoint Kaffeetasse 42 — January 24, 2008 @ 8:45 pm
I’m glad somebody is compiling this information! To be honest I was very surprised at how well Office 2003 integrates with Sharepoint 2007. I had been told lot’s of stories about how we would need to upgrade to Office 2007 to make it worthwhile (including stories from Microsoft themselves), and yet the integration works fine. It was like black magic to see our Office 2003 applications suddenly start showing Sharepoint options once the MOSS servers were switched on.
Comment by Ross — January 25, 2008 @ 12:51 am
Have you noticed different levels of integration depending upon the Service Packs of Office 2003? For example, we have a user with SP1 that can’t check an Office document in to a Sharepoint 2007 Library directly from the Office application. She can only do it from the web browser.
Thanks
Comment by Dan — February 19, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
I haven’t noticed that there are different levels of intergration depending upon the service packs of office 2003. I will research into this issue and will post the findings.
Thanks for sharing this with me.
Jag
Comment by Jag — February 20, 2008 @ 1:22 am
Thanks for this, have been looking for information on integrating MOSS with older versions of Office for a while now!
Do you have any idea if MOSS works with MS Project Server 2003? If so, are there any known issues/bugs that I need to know about?
Our client is looking into upgrading to MOSS but not the latest version of Project Server.
Cheers
Comment by Mits — March 5, 2008 @ 11:18 am
I am very novice when it comes to EPM.
MOSS does not support PS 2003. You have to upgrade to PS 2007.
I know it hurts!
Comment by Jag — March 6, 2008 @ 5:03 am
In the document it does not break down the feature comparison of Office 2003 Standard and Office 2003 Enterprise. The ‘Edit in Datasheet’ feature, which does not work with Office 2003 Standard is not even mentioned. I had a client this week go crazy after spending all this money on their MOSS implementation, only to find out that Edit in Datasheet still doesn’t work for them (because they have Office 2003 Standard Edition). It would be great if you could add this (and anything else that appears broken to a user) to the document.
Comment by Alan — April 4, 2008 @ 3:01 am
Our company use MSOffice2003 also but it workin with
“Edit in DataSheet” , Do you have IE 6 or IE 7? IE6 will not work, try IE 7!
Comment by Patty Dejkriengkarikul — December 30, 2008 @ 4:18 am
Useful information, thanks for posting this. A couple of comments:
- it would be very useful to have an Office 2007 column added to the end to show what benefits that really gives.
- a bit more information or links to show what the enhanced capabilities are
Note: the pop up window on the right of the screen with your details in covers up a lot of the information in older web browsers and it can’t be removed.
Comment by Chris Lynam — October 28, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
I just found an interesting item that should be added to this. If you are running IE6 and Office XP you can check out and edit documents in the web browser. If you are running IE 7 you can check out but NOT edit documents. You get a dialog box that states that you need a compatible program to edit the document. You can click on it and it opens but the edit function in the drop down list doesn’t work.
Comment by Dan McPherson — November 7, 2009 @ 5:15 am