I received an interesting question this week from a customer, and something that seems like a fairly common scenario. My customer just finished an upgrade/consolidation from WSS 2.0 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. They aren’t anticipating a quick upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010 at this point – they own it but they have other projects in the works and won’t have the resources to dedicate to the upgrade in the near term.

However, they are planning on deploying a new version of Office, and they want to know what you lose by using Office 2010 with SharePoint 2007 (versus SharePoint 2010). And most importantly, is Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 a better experience than Office 2010 and SharePoint 2007.

I’ve seen a lot of content that flips this scenario around, comparing Office 2007 versus Office 2010 against SharePoint 2010. But this is very different. So after doing a little looking on my own and pinging my Office Specialist, I was alerted to a helpful Appendix section at the end of the recently released “Collaboration without Compromise” whitepaper.

If you look at Appendix B there is a section comparing Office 2010 against SharePoint versions in a nice table format. This is a great resource, but I did want to make a few additional notes:

• You definitely need to read beyond the heading for each row. In some cases there are subtle differences and the headings aren’t enough to understand the differences.
• SharePoint Designer 2010 cannot be used to edit SharePoint 2007 sites. So if you use SPD will need to install SPD 2007 separate from the Office 2010 install.
• SharePoint Workspace 2010 (offline client for SharePoint sites - part of Office 2010 Pro Plus) can’t be used with SharePoint 2007 sites. See section on SharePoint Workspaces from this SP Workspace help content: http://office2010.microsoft.com/client/helppreview14.aspx?AssetId=HA010288417&lcid=1033&NS=GROOVE&Version=14&tl=2&CTT=5&origin=HA101856398
• And finally Office Web Apps (web versions of Office 2010) need SharePoint 2010 to work. This could be SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010, but SharePoint 2010 must be installed and the content must be stored in this environment.

I think the real question is, “if we are sticking with SharePoint 2007 for the next 6 months to a year, does it make sense to deploy Office 2010 now, or would it be better to deploy Office 2007 and upgrade to 2010 when we move to SharePoint 2010?” In my opinion I would absolutely recommend moving to Office 2010 now. I’ve run with this mix in our internal Microsoft environment for many months and there is nothing missing from this scenario versus using Office 2007. And I was able to take advantage of several Office 2010 benefits that don’t require SharePoint 2010.

Hope this helps – I’m sure my bulleted list isn’t a complete list of differences so feel free to add a few more in the comments.