VSTO 3.0; They have actually made it too easy

In the near future I will present the new VSTO features in Visual Studio 2008 for the MOSSIG crowd. But I want to share this bit of info with you now, just to wet your appetite.





A new publish feature has been added that allows for very smooth and clean publish/click-once experience for Office 2007 Add-ins and the other 2007 Project types such as document templates with code behind.

So I went ahead and published to our local network and logged on to a virgin XP-machine to run the setup. All went well and the solution (and it's pre-requisites) were installed as I expected.
But, when I tried to create a new document using the Word template from my solution I was presented with the following error:



It Indicates that the network location was not 'trusted'. The developer I am and drawing upon my previous experience with .net security I set about finding the caspol commands to fix this, and that does require running an elavated command prompt in Vista etc. Note that this is the day after christmas so I may not have been as alert as I usually am ;-). Anyway, now for the too easy part; all I should have done was go into Word and using the Office button, Word Options, Trust Center add the location as a trusted location..... I know this may strike so of you as very obvious, but I'm assuming most will have the same Aha experience I had, so that's why I'm posting it here. Here's the link to the Office On-line help page that explains the whole thing in detail.

I'll get back to you with more on VSTO 3.0 in the very near future.

Happy New Year,
Ed

Is this using SharePoint?

http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com/

Cool stuff, hope non-US people will get access soon.

For those who want to Share some great work they’ve been doing with Office System

Office System Solution Showcase at the next MOSSIG meeting (dec. 12th)

As we only have 5 spots available to present we ask that you could please email a short synopsis of your 15min presentation to Tim @ tim.wragg@pa.com.au
This should include
• An outline of the solution,
• technologies used & why (must have an Office System Component)
• key take-aways for MOSSIG members. - your peals of wisdom (or war stories) : so no sales pitches, we want the good stuff.

Remember: The more interesting & informative your synopsis is the better your chances of being selected in the 5 presentations for the night.
We are looking for solutions using a range of Office System technologies that are real implementations for clients.

• Entries close by COB Wednesday 5th of December whereby the Top 5 will be selected.
• All entries will have correspondence back by the 6th so the top 5 have time to prepare before the Christmas Party on the 12th Dec.
• 2 Prizes (Office 2007 Ultimate – worth $1000) will be awarded on the night for the best solution and the most informative. This will be judged by the audience.

MOSSIG Christmas Party

5.30pm on the 12th December @ Microsoft
Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place
Melbourne, Australia.

We will have drinks and nibbles over the night for a casual end to the year topped off with some great presentations of the work done by our MOSSIG members over the year.
For more information check our website at www.mossig.net or register for our monthly newsletter at register@mossig.net

Not how you want to start your Monday

So there I was minding my business and getting my coffee; I walked into my Office and I got a "Good Morning, we have a problem 'our SharePoint sites are down....'".

We got 404 errors on all our sites. After some interrogation tactics I found out one of my colleagues was in on Sunday and decided to run all security patches on the servers and go for the re-start. After that everything was black, so I started digging into event logs and log files. I noticed entries about SharePoint not being able to access the content database and schema inconsistency after running the configuration wizard. (we didn’t run that wizard but it seems some update did).

After some googling I decided to try:

Stsadm –o upgrade –inplace –url http://<...>

And that brought everything back!, Pfffff, earned myself another cuppa. And I will make sure that backup can be restored when I need it.

Have a good week!

Ed

Outlook Add-in and SharePoint: Getting Started

As some of you might know I was involved with the CA Visual Objects community in a previous life. "VO" as we passionately call it is a Win-32 bit environment with good OO-support and an xBase (Clipper) background, somewhat like Visual Foxpro. And soon there will even be a .net version called Vulcan!

In the VO forum I was requested to write some articles about how to save e-mail into SharePoint. So I've done some research and came up with a few really basic articles that explain how to create an Add-in for Outlook 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE, how to save items to SharePoint, how to add context menu items etc. All in C#.

The articles are posted here: http://www.softwareobjectives.com.au/VoConversion/Article%20Archive/Forms/HomePage.aspx (this is Part I and II, more to follow soon). The objective of the articles is to keep the code limited to a few lines, each time expanding a bit more. The first deals with how to hook up event handlers and save send mail to SharePoint automatically, the second how to add a context menu item and save incoming mail manually. Next I will add some info on how to process multiple Items, introducing the new Table/SQL queries for Outlook, add dialogs on Save and set item properties so that mail can be 'tagged' for the correct client, staffmember, order or whatever kind of context you would like to add.

If you have any questions or requests of other functionality you would like to know about just leave a comment.

Office DevCon 2007. Sydney, Australia 3rd-4th Nov 2007. Will you be there?

How about a free two day Office Developer Conference?

Check out the details quickly and register before they run out of space.

Another MOSS Site goes public

I know, it's just an out of the box site, but that's the point. With MOSS you can have a good looking fully content managed site up within a day or two. Obviously most of the time getting the content right takes a bit longer ;-) so we are still working on that.

Check out www.SoftwareObjectives.com.au .

Mossig September meeting: Enterprise Search Extravaganza

26th Sept 2007 at 5:30pm
To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 25th September 2007.

This month MOSSIG will be presenting a series of Enterprise Search related topics, so come along and find out how Enterprise Search can help you unlock your businesses data and improve productivity.

Show and Tell Session
Contact Selector Control in InfoPath (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath

Ben Walters from Strategic Data Management will be providing a brief overview of the Contact Selector control available in InfoPath 2007.

Business Session
Search possibilities in your Enterprise (Tim Wragg)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

According to IDC (Content Technologies Study 2004-2005), workers spend 9.5 hours per week searching. Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he discusses the Enterprise Searching capabilities of SharePoint 2007 and what it means for business.
The presentation will include,
· positioning of the current search landscape from desktop to the web and where its going,
· search features including documents, people, business data and other sources,
· tips and tricks for an effective implementation , and
· the gotcha’s in features and licensing.

Technical Session
How to access and search business data (Matthew Cosier)

• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 • Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Tool

In this half-hour session Matthew Cosier from Readify will step you through the means of integrating external data with the Business Data Catalog, and exposing it via search. In particular he will take you through the process of writing a BDC web service, generating the application definition using the new Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, and finally exposing the data to SharePoint search.

Are you into VSTO 2005 Development?

If you are you may want to update your VSTOR. As I understand it has been updated with support for Office 2003 and 2007 under Vista but there isn't much detail on what was added and fixed "This version is a July 2007 update that contains enhancements and bug fixes to the original VSTO 2005 SE runtime; for example, it contains fixes related to add-in support for Microsoft Office Outlook." is all the doc that comes with it.

Note that there are two different updates, one for design time (adds support for VS 2008!) and the VSTOR itself.

Design time update

Runtime update

Also updated are the instructions for deployment of VSTO Solutions on MSDN:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332051.aspx

While you are in VSTO mode you may also want to watch this video of Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs on OBA and VSTO they made at Tech-Ed 2007.

Office Development News

I'm normally not posting about other Blog posts but these are hot and very important to those of use in the realm of Office Business Applications. So here I go:

The first one is about the release of both a new MOSS SDK as well as a WSS SDK.

"The latest and greatest MOSS SDK release just went LIVE with an exciting new tool: The BDC Application Definition Editor! This tool abstracts the way you create entities in the Application Definition File by giving you an easy to use UI. "

Read more here. And make sure you scroll down to read everything.

The second one is by one of my favorite MS-Bloggers Erika Erhli, she's got a great post on my favorite subject, creating documents programmatically.
Excellent stuff, thanks Erika!

Lasty, make sure you are subscribed to the OBA team Blog as they continue to produce high level documentation and case studies about how Office System is and can be used.

MOSSIG Agenda for next week

We have some very cool sessions scheduled for next week.

Show and Tell Session
Using mapping in to assist productivity (Daniel Colarossi)
• Microsoft Virtual Earth • Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office Outlook

Daniel has been developing some cool Virtual Earth based solutions and this month he will be showing us how to get Virtual Earth inside Outlook and SharePoint and hopefully how to behave itself while in there.

Business Session
Successful SharePoint Adoption (Brian Cook)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Brian will talk about the issues affecting SharePoint adoption and provide strategies that can be used to increase usage and ROI.

Technical Session
Deploying InfoPath forms using Outlook 2007 (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath • Microsoft Office Outlook

Ben will be showing us how to deploy InfoPath 2007 forms using Outlook 2007.

27th June 2007 at 5:30pm To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 26th June 2007.

Interactive Office Developer Map

Here's a little gem I picked up from the Office Business Applications Team bLog a nice WPF based application that gives you a nice way to drill down in to features and tools that are available for Office Developers. Get it here and spend a few minutes discovering WPF or should I say Silverlight?, One Click deployment and the Office Developer Eco-system. BTW I would not mind reading the article explaining how they built the map!

The Ultimate Gadget, start saving!

Picked this up on Don's blog, I want more than one I think want one in the loo, in the living, in the kitchen.... I remember a video of a guy doing a demo on stage of this technology but had no idea it was already this far advanced. Check it out !

Astoria, Yet Another Programming Model?

There I was reading up on Astoria, David Lemphers was using it, so it must be worth a few minutes of my research time.
I did not get it, to me it looked like just another way of accessing data over http. What's wrong with with WebServices and Datasets? So I popped the question to David while I was visiting last night. And I re-read the site on Astoria today because what he was telling me was much more of a compelling reason to start looking at the technology (or platform?). My data in the cloud, not having to worry about a server, a database, backup's, scalability etc. I like the idea, not for all data of course, but I can certainly see some applications. I hope they quickly get around to offering us a way to start exploring this. I'm beginning to like the cloud, now I need to figure out how I can make some money by making good use of it.

Keep us on our toes David!

MOSSIG Making people happy

Congratulations Andy,

You were one of the lucky winners of the MOSSIG door prize last night. You have won a full version of Windows Vista® Business and a 60-day trial version of Microsoft® Office Professional 2007.

Isn't that cool?, not only do you get lots of free training and information, but people walk out the door with copies of Vista! Last night was all about Outlook Add-ins, Custom Task pane development (in Outlook and Word) and what Microsoft CRM looks like for an Office user. Very interesting presentations. You can download the ppt's at mossig.net in the Archive section.

The next meeting will be Wednesday the 27^th of June 2007, read all about it in the next newsletter or on the Web Site.

Configuring Reporting Services Reports in SharePoint

Getting started with the SharePoint Reporting Services Add-in in SQL Server 2005 SP2

Update Jan 2008: MS has finally posted a good article about RS and SharePoint integration on msdn. SQL Server 2005 Integration with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Troubleshooting Integration with SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SharePoint Technologies

After installing and configuring SQL Server 2005 SP2 and the Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint your Office SharePoint Server can be used for delivering and managing Reporting Services Reports. This assumes you have installed Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode. This article won't be about installing and configuring SP2 and Reporting Services because that is described pretty well in the various readme's that come with SP2 and books on-line. This article will start with how to setup your document libraries, how to create data sources and reports and focus on how to create pages in your site that access those reports. We'll have a look at how to simply execute Reports but also how Filter web parts can provide parameter values and how you can use Business Data Catalog field values for filtering.

The target audience for this article is designers or developers that have some experience using SharePoint, Web Part pages and connectable Web Parts looking for a quick introduction in how to integrate Reporting Services Reports.

Installing the Add-in installs Reporting Services specific content types, what you will need to do is add these content types to a document library that you will use to store the actual Report Definitions.

In the Document Library settings first enable management of Content types in the Advanced Settings page of the Document Library Settings. After doing this you will have a section called Content Types and a link 'Add from existing site content types'.

Figure 1, Accessing Document Library Settings

Figure 2, Adding content types to Document Library

Click that link and on the following select the 'Report Server Content Types' from the top combo box, now add all content types, you screen should look like the figure 3.

Figure 3, Selecting the Reporting Services Content Types

Now click ok and your Document Library is ready to start storing, managing and executing reports. If you have created a Document Library with no other goal in mind, now would be a good time to delete the default Content Type (Doc) and make Report Builder Report the default. Strictly speaking if you are not going to allow users to build their own reports you do not need the Report Builder Model Content type.

Figure 4, Content Types for a Document Library after configuring it

Come release time you should be able to deploy Visual Studio Report Projects directly to a Reporting Services server in SharePoint integration mode. In the CTP build I found it less problematic to go through the deployment process manually and also gain the insight in the different pieces of the puzzle.

The first piece is a Data Source, you might have noticed this type of file as one of the available content types. Create a new Data source by opening the Document library and selecting Data Source from the 'New' dropdown in the toolbar.

Figure 5, Adding a DataSource Item

Fill out the fields just like any other Data source using a conventional connection string and the authentication method you would like to use. Click ok, this will save an. rsds file in the Document Library.

Next create a Report Definition file (.RDL) using the Business Intelligence Studio. Don't use the Content type Report Builder Report just yet, this will install and launch the user friendly Report Builder application but will rely on a previously uploaded Report Builder Model which we don't have yet.

After uploading right click the uploaded file and look at the various options. You'll see that the Add-in has all the Report Management options available on the RDL File Type.

Figure 6, New options added for the RDL Content Type

We can make the Report use the previously created Data Source by choosing Manage Data Sources. Click on the Data source, choose Shared Data source and point to the previously created Data Source file.

Figure 7, Modify the Datasource to use a Shared Data Source

Using a Shared Data Source is convenient because this will enable you to modify the connection settings for multiple reports in one place but you can obviously use custom Data Sources for each Report should you need that.

Clicking on the Report actually executes the Report by opening a new page containing a Report viewer control created specially for SharePoint (the RSViewerpage.aspx) another component installed by the Add-in.

Figure 8, A Report executed by simply clicking.

Now add another report that uses a Report Parameter.

Figure 9, Default Report with a Parameter

Figure 10, Configuring the Filter.

This (Figure 9) is what the default Report Viewer page generates for a Report with one Parameter. Using the connectable Web Parts infrastructure in SharePoint we can do a lot better. First of all we need to create a Web Part page that will show our Report using a Report Viewer Web Part. In a full blown site you probable have a specific Document library to create those kinds of pages in, or you create them using SharePoint Designer. For the Demo I have added the Web Part Page content type to our Document Library and created the page here in the same Document Library as the reports. Go ahead and open the page and choose Edit Page from the Site Actions. Click Add a Web Part and add the Reporting Services Viewer part from the miscellaneous category. Open the tool pane and open select the appropriate Report. Click Exit Edit Page and you will see pretty much the same Report View as in the previous version using the RSReportViewer page only this time the actual Report is nested in a Web Part. This means we can now add other Web Part that can communicate with our Report. You can for example opt for a 'Choice Filter' Web Part from the Filter category and configure it as demonstrated in Figure 10.

Next connect it to the Viewer Web Part using the context menu for the Web Part in Page Edit mode.

Figure 11, Connecting the Filter part to the Viewer
You can click the grey bar next to the Report to collapse the viewers' parameter panel as the parameter now gets the value from the filter part. If there are multiple parameters in a Report, SharePoint will show a popup allowing you to choose how to hook them up. Beware that you have allowed Popup's on the site you are configuring.

It is even possible to use a Filter Part that displays a list in SharePoint using a filtered view that provides the Report Name to the Viewer Part. Or use a Business Data Catalog filter to use a lookup from a Line of Business System to control Report Parameters. They all work pretty much in the same consistent way.

Mixing and matching the right Web Parts this way allows you to quickly build reasonably complex dashboards without any programming. Note that you can have one Filter Part controlling multiple Report Viewer part at the same time! Combining this with some of the other Web Part types allows you to build sophisticated dashboards. There are Web Parts for Analysis Services, Excel, KPI's and Business Data forms and lists. More than enough options to impress the boss or clients I would think.

Download inks:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1e53f882-0c16-4847-b331-132274ae8c84


Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=47&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=1e53f882-0c16-4847-b331-132274ae8c84&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3dD07219B2-1E23-49C8-8F0C-63FA18F26D3A%26displaylang%3den

Accessing SharePoint content illegally

I know Fitz, just in case you read this, I should not be doing this. But fact of the matter is, I had a WSS 3-content database and no easy way to restore the sites. We have migrated to a different server months ago and some obscure deep down sites were not migrated over. But I did need some files from the Document Libraries. So I wrote a little .net app that accesses the content database directly (I figured Fitz wouldn't mind because that database is not in use anymore) and am now able to see what files are there and restore them to disk.

Just (b)logging this and letting the world know it can easily be done. If anyone has a need for the code they can contact me.

Ed

Presentations galore

I have just delivered a talk on Office 2007 and Vista for business users for the Computer group of CPA Australia. I think it was as useful for me as for them, amazing to hear what business users think of Microsoft and Office and I think it was as amazing for them to hear what Office 2007 can do for them. Although I spend a fair amount of time on Content Types etc. I got the most positive feedback and questions about the workflow features I touched on discussing Word and SharePoint. They also loved PowerPoint 2007.
It looks like there's still plenty of work for us and MS to get the message across.

Next week I will be presenting the technical session of the monthly Mossig meeting in Melbourne. It will be all about using Custom Task Panes (or Document Action Panes) in Word accessing live Line of Business data and inserting that into template and schema driven documents. I've got an interesting demo of context sensitive panes that show different options and data depending on where a user is in a document.

If this interests you don't be shy and come to our free meeting, just send me a note at register@mossig.net so that we can order enough pizza's.

Creating Word-XML document in Office 2003

By now you have probably noticed I am very much into Documents with smarts, long time ago I wrote an article about how to create business documents with schema's and xml. Below is the intro and link to this article on www.voconversion.com.au which actually is a site dedicated to developers that need to bridge the gap between Win32 apps., .net and Office. Many more articles there!


Using Word as an Automation server to insert data in a document is good enough for small documents that need a few data-elements. As soon as the amount of data grows or multiple documents have to be generated, the speed is generally not good enough.

Further more, while such a process is in progress the application is usually blocked and the user can only wait, or abort because they do not understand what is happening.

Using XML as the file format for generating Business Documents will deliver flexibility, scalability, and simplicity for the developer and End users alike.

This article presents a way to write the data part of documents without even starting Word, yet it will use Word for display and/or print and allow the users to alter the appearance of the documents without the need for developers. As long as the data and schema contains the information that is required, users have more or less complete freedom to apply formatting and layout as they need to. Documents like this can have several different appearances for different purposes. A user could decide to view the details of an order, or an overview of sales in that day all using the same generated XML data. Different kinds of views can be defined by developers or users or existing ones can be modified on the fly. The documents can be generated on a server without installing Word which is a big bonus. This is also a very convenient option for websites that let users download data or Word documents.

Read the full article here: http://www.voconversion.com.au/VoConversion/Article%20Archive/Generating%20business%20documents%20using%20XML%20and%20MS.mht

Mossig and SharePoint certification and training

Last Wednesday night we had another good user group meeting hosted by Microsoft and Mossig.
Topics covered where an interesting Office Add-in by one of the group members, Kevin Ramsey who demonstrated how the Custom Task Pane in various Office application can be utilised to show Line of Business Data and provide users with customised actions. For example quickly creating Outlook tasks relating to specific Business Data. Marc Dimmick gave us some good reasons to consider using Groove from a business perspective and Elaine van Bergen presented the low-down on WSS and Office Server developer exams.

Mentioned was the fact that MS just released a new Developer portal on MSDN for Groove so here's a link in case you are looking for it.

I would like to add to Elaine's information that there is now a great offer for e-Learning for WSS available (6 courses for under 200 $US) which will be of good value if you are preparing for the WSS-development exam.

Some more news from the Office Development front:

Maybe a bit late, last week the release version of Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was made avalable for download.

Also of interest to MOSS-developers will be the VSTA SDK that Paul Stubbs bLogs about.

BTW, I'm reading VSTO for Mere Mortals at the at the moment and it is very refreshing to see that there is now an entry-level book available for those of you who just get started looking at VSTO or want to move from VBA-programming into VSTO. My compliments to Kathleen and Paul on releasing this great resource, I like it a lot.

Note that we have decided to move the next Mossig meeting to the 2nd of May because of a publi holiday on our regular meeting date.

Eating your own Dogfood

Would you like to see a big, live SharePoint site?
Here's one Microsoft is running:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.aspx they state it's an experiment. Let's see where they go with this. I've only had a quick look, is that a SharePoint page with a newsgroup/forum interface on the Forums tab, or just heaps of links?
And what's that Live QnA thing?

Certainly looks like a site I'm going to explore and a good aggregation of what's hot in SharePoint 3.0.

Another site built using WSS 3.0

Introducing www.VOConversion.com.au

Geoff Schaller and I are offering VO’ers a new and comprehensive resource to help launch themselves into the Dot Net world. Through the resources of Software Objectives and our user group community we are providing, white papers, blogs and RSS feeds for a range of key conversion and integration topics:

• DBF to SQL
• VO to C#
• VO with Visual Source Safe
• VO and MS Office and MS Sharepoint
• Web services
• RSS feeds
  
  The basis for this material is for developer who needs to keep VO for the long haul but must get into Dot Net now. Our aim is to migrate your mind, not your code, so the implicit objective of this material is to get your VO apps working right now with many aspects of the Dot Net framework. We don’t care what Dot Net language you choose to use: SQL C#, VB or Vulcan, the aim is to show you how you can leverage your existing application code with this new environment.
  
  Many of the articles and papers describe the underlying Dot Net or Microsoft product and many provide coded samples to show you how to implement some feature directly from VO right now. For example, one of the first candidates is how to deploy or consume RSS feeds. Not only will you learn the XML involved, write a C# web service to manage it, you will also have all the VO implementation code to integrate RSS right into your VO apps immediately. The SQL material comes heavily referenced to our SQL classes but practical sample code is also provided.
  
  Our aim is to prove to VO’ers that they are capable of utilising the latest tools and features of SQL, Dot Net, MS Office and MS Sharepoint right now. You don’t have to wait to give all these great goodies to your clients.
  
  The website is new and we are using it as a learning experience ourselves so there may be bugs and issues with it. For instance, site searching is not yet enabled. If you have comments or suggestions, please email them to me. We are keen to provide the best resource possible.

Content Types are everwhere

You might have noticed, there's a lot of buzz around Content Types in Word and SharePoint 2007. Now they have made it to MSDN: Have a look at this great new Content Type on MSDN about.... you guessed it, Content Types :-), well actually its about Content Controls, but you wouldn't use them if it wasn't in the context of a Content Type now would you?

Read more about what's coming up in these Visual How Tos on Erika's blog.

Very nice work Erika, Lisa and Brian !

SharePoint on-line 'support'

Important news for SharePoint implementors and developers. This was posted on the SharePoint Team bLog which was sometimes used as a communication channel to the Dev. Team:

" I hope that you’ll agree with me that once a blog entry gets beyond 15 or so comments, the conversation becomes difficult to follow. Yes, we’ve long had newsgroups as a channel for these types of conversations, but their lack of scoped/filtered search, moderation, HTML support, and tagging has limited their usefulness. Hence, following the lead of other product groups such as SQL Server and Exchange Server, I’m pleased to announce the SharePoint Products and Technologies forums on MSDN, which are mirrored on TechNet. As I mentioned in one of my “Welcome” messages, these forums are being positioned and managed (with MVP and product group participation) as the de facto channel for community Q&A and discussion going forward. The newsgroups will continue to exist for the benefit of those who simply cannot give up the 2-way offline synchronization functionality, which is the only significant shortcoming of forums. "

Clippy is back

No more Clippy in Office 2007. It seems that Microsoft gave Clippy the sack (if you want to know why, read this or the more graphic version.) , the good news is that he (or is it a she?) has bounced back and started a life without Microsoft. Here's the new home. Lots of tips and good introductions to Office 2007 features. This site also looks like a good starting point when you are looking for books. It seems to focus on the Client applications.