Over the past week or so, a few folks have inquired about the user experience if/when they decide to deploy Outlook 2007 without the rest of the Office 2007 suite.   The most common scenario is where an enterprise customer migrates to Exchange and wants to deploy Outlook ASAP to take advantage of the new Exchange infrastructure. 

 

Deploying Outlook 2007 without enabling the rest of Office 2007 is a scenario that has been documented in several whitepapers.  These should help understand some of the impacts.

Impact of deploying Outlook 2007 without Word 2007  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179031.aspx

Determine when to install Outlook 2007   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179026.aspx

 

Information about using 2007 Office suites and programs on a computer that is running another version of Office http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928091/en-us

 

Some additional considerations are:

  • When an Enterprise customer installs Outlook 2007, the setup process is going to bring all of Office 2007 down into the local cache (c:\MSOCache).  Meaning, there still needs to be hard drive space for all of the Office 2007 bits.   See """Required local installation source for the 2007 Office system"  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179074.aspx.   If you go this route, you can install the rest of the suite from the Local Installation Source (LIS) at a later date.  See "Run Setup from the local installation source to install the 2007 Office system " http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179070.aspx
  •   When security updates are made available, you will need to update both Office versions.

 

Coexistence with multiple versions of Office installed has typically resulted in issues.  Information about using 2007 Office suites and programs on a computer that is running another version of Office  can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928091

 

If there is a mix of 2003 and 2007 Office applications installed on a Vista operating system, and users attempt to access Office documents located on a SharePoint document library, the following issue may occur.

You cannot create a new document or check out an existing document in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 document library when you have multiple versions of Office installed http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929360/

NOTE:  This has been resolved by hotfix article 938888 that is included in 2007 Office SP1.