Office 2007 on a XP / Server 2003 Network

[mattx]

Been asked to look at this - moving up from Office 2003 to Office 2007 on a XP / Server 2003 network.

Anyone got any advice / tips / gotcha's or general pointers I should be aware of ?

Personally I don't really want to go down this route until I deploy Server 2008 and Vista in a few years time as I cannot see the benefit apart from the new ribbon.

I look forward to your replies !! [ Good and bad please ]

[Sylv3r]

We upgraded to Office 2007 in September across the whole school. We have put little training on for staff as they all picked it up relatively easily.

 

The biggest pain is the new file extensions .docx, .xlsx etc. The biggest problem is staff / students saving files to take home.

 

The other problem was staff e-mailing documents to people outside of the school - I have sinced banned the Office 2007 extensions on our mail server to stop all the problems.

[Michael]

Unless there's a specific technical reason, why upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007? I would stick to the plan of "when deploying Vista, deploy Office 2007"

[Lithium]

We upgraded to Office 2007 in September across the whole school. We have put little training on for staff as they all picked it up relatively easily.

 

The biggest pain is the new file extensions .docx, .xlsx etc. The biggest problem is staff / students saving files to take home.

 

The other problem was staff e-mailing documents to people outside of the school - I have sinced banned the Office 2007 extensions on our mail server to stop all the problems.

 

 

In the Customisation Wizard for creating the the Install... I remember seeing an option which let you specify what the default file type was for saving documents in O2k7 is... Not sure if it worked... I merely played around with it to make sure I could deploy it.

[Sylv3r]

The reason we upgraded was we opened a new Sixth Form Centre and with the purchase of 250 new machines we decided when we had the money to go out and buy the relevant number of licences for the new build and the rest of the school.

 

We could have sat on the licences but I choose just to roll it out. We weren't using Office 2003 but Office 2000 at the time.

[Michael]

If you're upgrading machines from Office 2000 to 2007 to standardise Office across your domain, then yes I agree with your thinking/strategy. Office 2000 is also in extended support phase now as it is pretty old!

 

I'd recommend you create an admin install of Office and slipstream Service Pack 1 which contains all the latest fixes. The switches you use to create/update an admin install have changed from what we'd use for Office 2000/XP/2003.

 

You can download the Office Resource Kit which will allow you to tweak various settings with Group Policy.

 

Hope this helps

[Gatt]

We upgraded due to demand - more and more pupils were using Office 2007 at home and had documents in the new format.

 

For Staff PC's (which are now archaic and cannot be replaced due to a huge cut in budget as a result of BSF!!) we have installed the Compatibility Tool to allow them to open the 2007 format.. Those machines that can take it have been given Office 2007..

[srochford]

Unless there's a specific technical reason, why upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007? I would stick to the plan of "when deploying Vista, deploy Office 2007"

 

I like Office 2007 and I think it makes a lot of things easier to find than Office 2003 (mainly because everything is dumped on the ribbon!) - people somehow seem to click on things more when they can see them compared to having to hunt through dialogue boxes!

 

It's also much less of a change than going to Vista - it will run on pretty much the same hardware as earlier versions of Office so you don't have to replace all your computers to get it to run.

 

there have been threads before about the problems of getting both 2003 and 2007 on the same machine; there are kludges to get both working without doing "first run" screens each time but none is elegant. What you can do is use Softgrid to deploy one version and then install the other "normally". MS don't support Office 2007 on Softgrid (although there are Technet articles on the best way to do it) but the other way round is fine.

 

Softgrid has weird licensing - it's only available as part of the Desktop Optimization Pack - but it's a very useful product!

[zag]

Office 2007 is great, if only because the new file formats are half the size of the 2003 ones!

 

It really is a good piece of software and well worth installing.

 

It has nothing to do with the operating system really so no need to look at vista or server 2008 yet.

[Michael]

@srochford - Office 2007 is a nice product, however changes to the user interface are the biggest ever to date and as a result, I do think it's hit and miss whether users feel comfortable using it. People dislike change, (not just in IT), but in general so deploying Office 2007 must be carefully planned out with the necessary support to bring staff and pupils upto speed.

 

@ittech - Well to a point. Office 2007 won't install on Windows 2000, but most people/organisations (I believe) are running XP at the current time.