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SharePoint and Office Pro Plus

Most of the time, I don’t pay much attention to which specific package of Office that I’m using. I’m not talking version.  I’ve been running Office 2007 for more than a little bit now.  I’m not talking about that.  What I’m talking about is which edition I’m using.  Let me explain.

Microsoft sells the office bundle in Basic, Home & Student, Standard, Small Business, Professional, Professional Plus, Ultimate, and Enterprise versions.  There’s a good grid showing which programs you get with each version on the Microsoft Office Online site at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/office.

However, what’s not clear is that you can’t always assume that what you see is what you get – when you want to integrate with SharePoint.  You see there’s “magic” in Professional Plus, Enterprise, and Ultimate.  That “magic” does SharePoint integration “stuff”.  Some of it’s obvious.  Without InfoPath the document information panel (which is really an infoPath form) doesn’t work.

Help Your SharePoint User

However, one of the issues that I ran into was that there’s some property copying stuff that’s supposed to work to enable SharePoint server based properties to be visible in the Office documents – in my case word.   I had installed Office Professional in my test environment and added InfoPath later.  As a result my Document Information Panel worked – but the properties weren’t getting copied back to the document – only when they were in a content type.

I uninstalled Office Pro and Infopath and resinstalled Office Ultimate to test and the problem went away.

This isn’t conclusive proof that the issue I was facing was due to trying to use Office Professional plus an installation of InfoPath to work with the server, but it’s a strong indication that there’s something missing when this is done.  So from now on if I need Office and SharePoint to have the best friendship … I’m going to be using Professional Plus or better … something that ships with InfoPath in the box.

No more Office Professional and SharePoint for me…  Now if I could just figure out how to get that time back…

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