MOSS and Outlook 2007

We've had our MOSS farm deployed in production for almost 2 years now, and I still struggle with the heterogeneous environment where I work. Office 12 is the suite du jour for now in Microsoft-land, and you'll find the best compatibility using your MOSS with an Office 2007 (version 12) product. What I'm saying in not new...

It's 2009.2 out there, and Office 14 is being developed rapidly. Hopefully it will squash ideas that my users have about using Google Docs for collaboration. "You can edit the same document simultaneously!" Yes, big whoop, and your knowledge is in the hands of a company with a huge cloud and many, many eyes. This is not to say that I don't wish I had Google stock options, don't get me wrong.

I'm merely ranting because this is what I'm offering to my users: MOSS with all the bells and whistles for a better (not necessarily new) document collaboration. It is better than a network file share:

Versioning
Document Check-in/out
Meta-Tags
Alerts
Workflows
Search

I'm a server guy, and my workstation group is finally upgrading our Office 2003 clients to Office 2007. Of course, this is not for my MOSS. This is for the our new Exchange 2007 deployment. ("Oh, god, the ribbon bar will confuse our users!")

If you've every connected a MOSS document library to Outlook 2007, this is for you! My people complain that they don't know where to click to navigate our MOSS Intranet. Connecting a library to Outlook is a breeze. The content synchronizes and you can use Outlook's built-in previewer to read docs without needing to check them out or open Word/Excel, etc. I find this better than alerts! New documents added to libraries are marked as unread within Outlook. You can thus manage your information consumption through Outlook.

Okay, enough ranting for the week. I lost lots of time after coming down with the grippe. Back to roll-ups, workflows, and general SharePoint usage training.