Microsoft Office 2007 is about to retire. That’s to say, it will no longer be supported. And it’s a big deal. Microsoft Tech Community have put together a film ‘Office 2007 Retirement Party’ featuring heartfelt staff eulogies to the product, reminiscences about the good times and even a cake.
While the launch of the office suite was heralded by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with the official line that it was ‘a new era of business productivity and innovation’, more expressive perhaps are the words of a Microsoft engineer when he says,
“We dropped three years of functionality on you in one giant blob and said, ‘Here, eat this.’”
Why was it so groundbreaking? Well in short, for the first time this product offered the possibility of collaboration and data sharing. There was a brand new user interface along with the ribbon style menu we are familiar with today. Also with the introduction of Office Open XML file formats by default, it was suddenly easier to share information between programmes.
Hang on, we are a Salesforce house, why are we talking about Microsoft?
Couple of reasons. First of all it’s interesting to reflect that for Microsoft the collaboration element of their offering was secondary to their core purpose which was document creation and management. For Salesforce, it’s just the opposite: collaboration first, and only now are they really getting to grips with document management. No wonder so many organisations have gone for best of breed and integrated these two major players’ products.
Leading neatly to the second point: if you are one of those organisations and your current Salesforce integration uses any products in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, then it might be time to take another look at how that’s going to pan out in the post-support era…
If you’d like to know more about integrating Salesforce with Microsoft Office products, please drop us a line at Desynit and we can talk you through.
Photo by Andrew Knechel on Unsplash
