Christmas 2005 (beta 1 of Office “12”), well at least that was the time I deployed Office 2007. But I appreciate some of you may be the risk averse type. SP1 is usually a good milestone for mainstream-ity.

I had a realisation that Office 2007 had surpassed mainstream adoption over the last week. I am usually surrounded by Office 2007 users (I work at the company that invented it) and the people I meet are often other IT people (that are always running the latest and greatest). I still have a “ribbon-sense” and always get a buzz when I walk out of customer meetings and see people working with Office 2007 – it’s great that most organisations “just get it”. 

I noticed that on the TV news financial report last week where they show the stock shots of merchant bankers looking worried and staring into lots of data. But wait, they were using Excel 2007! “Thats all well and good for financial professionals”, you might think, but to hammer home that Office 2007 is mainstream, when I looked up from twitter and email triage I saw “Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food” – they were typing up the recipes on Word 2007 as well!

The ribbon has been a remarkable success, Autocad has adopted it, several of Jakob Nielsen’s best UIs of 2008 used the ribbon and we saw at PDC last week that the ribbon comes to Windows 7 and goes into the browser. A quick recap of the good resources available to you to help make the change:

Interactive Command Reference Guides, to help smooth the adoption of the new “ribbon-y ribbon” user interface:

• Interactive: Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide
• Interactive: PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide
• Interactive: Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide
• Interactive: Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 command reference guide
• Interactive: Access 2003 to Access 2007 command reference guide

Getting started tabs, to expose more help information to the users, right in the

• Word: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F587370C-FDAE-4EDE-B528-AC58031A5DFF&displaylang=en
• Excel - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8A5AF9D7-08A7-41BA-8844-76BB94228957&displaylang=en
• Power Point- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=831F0AE9-FC50-4074-96D3-D02FD98CB041&displaylang=en

And of course the Enterprise Learning Framework:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/desktopdeployment/bdd/elf/welcome.aspx

At this point in the release cycle some people may be tempted to say “Well, I have waited 5 years, maybe I should just wait a bit longer and skip a version”. I think this about marathons sometimes – “Well, I haven’t run at all in the last 5 years, maybe I should just rest up and run the next marathon”. It doesn’t work like that, we need to exercise our deployment muscle. How?

• Skill up on the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit – desktop deployment has probably advanced quite a bit since your last rollout
• Decide on an e-learning strategy. Free tools like the SharePoint Learning Kit and LCDS can make e-learning for the masses quite achievable
• Roll-out a small pilot (outside of IT), to seed your user community with experts. In every organisation there are power users that would love to have access to the latest greatest stuff. Understand the benefits that they realise and capture that in your business case
• Stocktake your environment to understand what file formats, third party applications and dependencies you have today. Keep this list up to date. Use the Office Migration Planning Manager to help with this.
• Deploy! I have seen some very large organisations deploy Office 2007 very quickly. With tools like System Centre, Softgrid and even just a well written script, Office deployment is child's play.