MOSS 2007/Office 2007 Deployment

[Bakedgoods]

Have any of you rolled out MOSS 2007 but remained with Office 2003? If so, how did you find the integration between the two? I understand that Office 07 integrates much more with MOSS so how did you find it?

If not, what was your strategy concerning the deployment of Office 2007 and MOSS 2007?

Did you opt to deploy Office and MOSS at the same time as a package? Or did you deploy Office before hand?

 

[Vince]

We had a WSS2 environment with office 2003. Firstly we decided to upgrade to office 2007 and then did a rolling upgrade to MOSS by running both WSS2 and MOSS side by side, this was mainly due to us wanting to take full advantage of the new features in MOSS while allowing us to redesign much of what we had in WSS2 i.e. navigation etc.

There are huge differences in integration between the office suites, if you really want to get the most out of MOSS office 2007 is a must have tool.

 

[Bakedgoods]

Yeah it seems pretty clear that the integration between the two is pretty fundamental.

It my mind the best path would be to upgrade to Office 2007 first and deal with the associated loss in producitivty and user challenges, then rollout Sharepoint 2007 afterwards.

 

[Vince]

Thats exactly how I did it. Upgrading office didn't surface as many issues as I thought it would have at first. People here quickly adjusted and within around 3 weeks many were singing its praises.

After roughtly a month (enough time for training and people to become accustomed) I stared upgrading sections of our portal one at a time.