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Review: A Comprehensive Look At Microsoft Office 2007: Page 20 of 20

Communicator is intended to give businesses an integrated, manageable client for the Live Communications Server. Much like IBM/Lotus's Sametime, Communicator uses server-based presence awareness information -- indicators that show who's online and how they're connected -- to enable secure IM and connect to public IM services and corporate telephony systems.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 won't be released with the rest of Office 2007, but is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2007.

InfoPath and SharePoint Designer: Easy AppDev for the Portal Age
The presence of InfoPath and SharePoint Designer on the list of Microsoft Office 2007 applications is perhaps more about marketing than about real benefit to most users of Microsoft Office. Both applications are development tools for creating or customizing applications to run on the SharePoint Server.


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InfoPath gives businesses a forms creation and management application they can use to deliver browser-based forms that connect to back-end data collection systems, either through the SharePoint Server or, if they're not running SharePoint, a new Office Forms Server 2007.

InfoPath handles the UI part of the forms-design process and lets designers build forms that can be completed in a browser or in other Office applications. Other application-development tools let programmers create workflows that route these forms for approval or reporting. The most complex workflow applications can be created by developers using the new Workflow Foundation piece of .NET 3.0. For end users, SharePoint Designer supports workflow creation without writing code.

SharePoint Designer 2007 is half of what used to be Office FrontPage, the WYSIWYG Web page creator. With Office 2007, FrontPage vanishes, replaced by SharePoint and Expression Web. SharePoint Designer is geared toward application-development tasks that would formerly have built applications that called the FrontPage Server Extensions, now embedded in the SharePoint Server. Expression Web, not a part of Office 2007, is aimed a professional Web designers. It requires .NET 2.0.

Sorting the Pieces
Not all of these client applications are available in all the eight different versions of Microsoft Office 2007. But this isn't as much of a limitation as it might appear, because the client apps most widely run by end users are also the most widely available.

While the Groove client, for example, is included in only two Office versions (Office Enterprise and Office Ultimate), it's freely distributed as a trial version to PC users invited into Groove workspaces. OneNote is missing from four versions of Office, but available as a stand-alone application for $99. Outlook, perhaps the most widely used of the Office client applications, is inexplicably missing from four versions of Office -- perhaps because Microsoft judged that the free and ubiquitous Outlook Express bundled with Internet Explorer was good enough for those markets. InfoPath is included only in the three high-end packages (Office Professional Plus, Office Enterprise, and Office Ultimate), and SharePoint Designer doesn't show up on any list.

Not every Word or PowerPoint user has a clear and present need for SharePoint Designer, to be sure, but the very presence of clients and appdev tools like these say a good deal about the future of Microsoft Office -- and perhaps about the future of desktop computing.

--David DeJean