Coming soon ... Office 2007

Unless we encounter some collosial snag, GCC will be making the trek from Office 2003 to 2007 sometime this summer ... along with a complete image refresh of all 180? computers, but that's a different post.  There are around 10 of us that have been "testing" Office2007 through the last beta release and into the final release last October.  The only issue that has surfaced through testing has been from testers accidentally sending an 02k7 doc to someone with O2k3 ... oh, that and others finding out that so-and-so has O2k7 and why don't they? :-)

Training hasn't been an issue, but the testers were informed that if they wanted O2k7 that they were on their own for support ... in other words this was completely non-supported software.  Our testers range from Admin Assistants up to Senior Management Team members ... and of course, IT.  Everyone who has O2k7 absolutely loves it, especially OneNote07. I've tasked our man Kyle with creating O2k7 training docs and such for those that want some initial hand holding.

I'm still wrestling with with version to get - Profession Plus or Enterprise? 

Office 2007 Professional Plus ($71 or $111 w/SA) includes ...

Access 2007 Communicator 2007 Excel 2007 InfoPath 2007

Outlook 2007 PowerPoint 2007 Publisher 2007 Word 2007

Office 2007 Enterprise ($86 or $XXX w/ SA) ... adds a few more SharePoint integration features along with ... OneNote and Groove

Access 2007 Communicator 2007 Excel 2007 * Groove 2007 ($32/$44) InfoPath 2007

* OneNote 2007 ($11/$18) Outlook 2007 PowerPoint 2007 Publisher 2007 Word 2007

Figure this will be a 4-5 year investment.  I'm leaning towards Enterprise because of OneNote and stronger SharePoint integration ... seems worth the small $ increase over 4+ years.

As I was finishing up this post over the weekend I stumbled upon Dave Stone's blog where he recently talked about the very successful Office 2007 training his team just completed for their church staff.  Thanks for sharing Dave ... I'll be stealing borrowing this for our own usage ;-)

Comments

[Brian Glass]

Crossroads is currently in the midst of transitioning to Google Apps for your domain. The beauty of it is there is no maintenance involved (a great boon for a church that can't afford an IT staff) and the basic version is free (ad-supported). Training has been nearly unnecessary and there are some great tutorial videos available for first-time users. The collaborative abilities rock.

[Josh]

We made the switch for just about our whole Church staff. We've had some issues with the trust center for opening documents on the network, but overall it's gone well. Make sure any macs you have are at least on OS/X 10.4 (I think) or else you can't update their office software to open the new files.

[Scott Reichling]

Great news! I love 2007 but I'm not so sure I will love supporting some of my users. Overall 2007 will be a big win for productivity. Are you deploying with System Center Essentials or in your new images?

BTW - check out Office 2007 charity pricing at provantage.com, they sell Office 2007 Enterprise for a couple of bucks more than your Office 2007 Pro Plus pricing.

Here is a link to their Office 2007 Enterprise /w SA pricing:
http://www.provantage.com/microsoft-open-charity-licenses-76j-00487~7MSOC2W4.htm

[David Szpunar]

I was going to say that the Zones price for Enterprise with SA is about $130 but that's more than Provantage! The extra cost is definitely worth it for Enterprise in my opinion. If you buy Pro Plus, and want to add Groove and OneNote later, you not only end up paying more (although OneNote itself without Groove is cheaper), but you also have to deploy them separately, with additional keys and more install discs to deal with).

The only downside is that from what I've been told, is that if you buy Pro Plus, you get downgrade rights to run Office 2003 Pro until you're ready to upgrade. However, since there wasn't an "Enterprise" version of 2003, you can't run Office 2003 on an Office 2007 license. That's just what I've been told by Zones' licensing dept. I'd be happy to hear otherwise.

[Mike Mayfield]

CDW has the office enterprise 2007 for $82 w/o SA per a quote I just received from them.

[Jason Powell]

Opps ... thanks guys. I meant to say that those prices I listed are straight from Microsoft's charity pricing list ...and yes, you should be able to get better pricing :-)