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Office 2007 Team Meeting Minutes, December 19, 2006

Present: Alex Kozlov,  Esther Yanow, Lisa St. Croix, Bill Brids, John Fothergill, Bronwen Heuer, Esther Yanow, Peter Milt

An Outlook 2007 Release Group met yesterday 12/18 and will work independently of this group's release effort.

Question - Will IS&T distribute Office inclusive / exclusive of Outlook Support. What is status of a disclaimer? jmhunt@mit.edu is set to draft set of recommendations / scenarios for installs of Office 2007 / and Outlook 2007 ******

SWRT Group to provide links to plugins for the Active X ( pdf readers) LOCATION OF LINKS tbd
- The links may be best located at software download page web.mit.edu/software
- Clients will need to be instructed to save to older versions of Office to be backwards compatible. They can additionally modify each applications settings to save to a backward compatible version Docs ? or Stocks
- How do I set *** 2007 to save in the 0ffice **** 1997-2003 format
Alex K. feels MIT will be a mixed environment of Office 2003&  Office 2007 for the next five years. This compatability issue should be addressed and be key deliverable of this group. John F. brought up ideas of customized installers. Alex to discuss with Atticus Gifford. Group discussed whether a customer installer was a viable option.
- greater education of consumer/ clients are other options
- greater education of consumer/ clients are other options
--- Most clients will be doing an upgrade install - and this should be documented We need to check an upgrade from OFFICE 2000 > 2007 ( do we document ? even though OFFICE 2000 unsupported)
are these "types" eligble for upgrade?
- Group agreed to deal with this 2000 upgrade issue at later date.
We need to leverage all venues of communication for compatability issues (John F. mentioned ITpartners)

Excel issue: Lisa St. Croix  and Bill both see an issue where in email / server launching of Excel that clicking on Excel file opens only the application or takes a long time ( > Forty secs. to load the file) Bill is using Outlook Express on an XP machine.
___ PowerPoint Issue to look into: Lisa with PPoint Fall 2006 > Lisa tried to convert to slideshow to hide notes. Even though she saved it in 2003 format. We need to find out how to save to older file format Spell Check in Outlook Express after 2007 install
- Bill has seen correctly speellleed words ( in his world) caught as incorrect after install of Office 2007 ******

Groups deliverabe should be to provide a best practice usage for OFFICE 2007 users >
STock answers > Esther wanted to know how the product (office 2007) will be delivered?

Alex - Media will be delivered to Software Liaisons for distribution. Is 2007 slated for a server distribution? To be answered by SWRT? Alex mentioned current plans:  Office 20007 be distributed via CDs only - Esther wants to ask IT Partners
-What are their needs and expectations for Outlook 2007?

Group to review Debs potential commmunication
- Esther to start Known issues doc.

Next meeting is scheduled for Jan 2 2007 Please send corrections or additions to office-release@mit.edu