Office XP and SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

[SPV]

Folks,

I know that some functionality of SharePoint 2007 is not available when the client only has Office XP. Specifically the Create and Edit in... options in a document library require Office 2003 or higher, which is a shame because they would be very useful.

However they do work for one of my colleagues, who happens to have Project 2003 installed alongside his standard Office XP installation. He has no other Office 2003 products installed.

This leads to me to wonder if we can install certain Office 2003 components over Office XP (without installing any Office 2003 products per se) to enable Create and Edit in...

Anyone got any ideas, views or experience in this?

Thanks.

 

[dsjoo]

I came across a very similar, but not exact, same problem as you. I have Sharepoint Service v3 and users with office xp, but no office 03 components (like project 03). They too were unable to use the Edit in functions. I upgraded a user to Project 03 and, voila, now they can use the Sharepoint site just as an Office 03 user does.

The logic seems to be that installing any Office 03 application alongside a standard Office 02/XP install solves the problem.

 

[PatricktheAnalyst]

I believe office 11 web components is an independent download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...a5-2056-46a1-84b1-337ffb549c5c&DisplayLang=en

Try that and see what happens.

Thanks!

Patrick

 

[SPV]

Thanks for the advice. I wasn't very clear in my original post, but we are trying to steer clear of installing anything directly related to Office 2003 to avoid licensing issues.

Since posting I have found a kb article (

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833714,

same date as my post) which talks about installing the Microsoft SharePoint Support component for Office XP. But we have an older install source for Office XP which doesn't include it, hence we don't have the all-important Owssupp.dll and its little army of minions.

However later install Office XP sources do seem to include this component (Front Page XP certainly does). We are currently looking at isolating the required files from that installer. If anyone expresses an interest in the results, I will try to post results.

 

[SPV]

Update in case anyone encounters the same problem in the future.

Our Office XP installation source wasn't 'old' as I previously thought. Instead someone had edited it and marked the 'Microsoft SharePoint Support component for Office XP' component as Not Available. This is why the option didn't appear in the installer.

At least we know now, and it's a simple installation.