Dear Microsoft - The word Ultimate means ‘Final’. Somehow, I suspect there will be future versions of Office and Windows - what do y’reckon?
Okay, so I’m a simple man really…
I’d been asked to demo a custom workflow to a customer. They’d some fairly clear requirements, and we just wanted to knock up a prototype. It was all about filling in ‘fields’ in a word document. “Great”, I thought, “we can allow them to do this entirely within Word”. And, looking at the marketing bumpf, the demos and the docs, yeah, we could. The workflow task could be displayed in MOSS, and the document properties pane would expose any other fields they needed.
Except… …I couldn’t get the ‘Edit this Task’ button to appear in Word. I know it should be able to - but it wasn’t. I tried everything; nope, nothing. In the end, I ran out of time - but one of my colleagues, of a slightly curious nature, kept plugging away at it.
It turns out, it was the wrong version of office. It used to be that versions of things were simple - there only was one for each ‘iteration’ of the software. Then we started getting ‘Home’ and ‘Professional’ - which was okay, and seemed sensible, to be honest. I liked that - it was simple, just like me.
Nowadays, I can’t f%$king understand the versions of anything Microsoft. Visual Studio - Express, Standard, Professional, Tools for Office, Web Developer, Team System - Architects, Team System - Software Developers, Team System - Testers, and Team System - Database Professionals, and Team Suite. Does that sound f$%king confusing? Do I have time to learn about all of these? 
And Vista! It has Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate.
Similarly, it turns out Office now has - Home, Student, Basic, Standard, Small Business, Professional, Professional Plus, Enterprise, Ultimate, Magnificent and Pan-Galactic. Okay, I made the last two up, but WTF! I don’t have time to learn all the features of all these versions - and trying to find out about their features is a wee bit opaque. I shouldn’t have to work this hard to know what Office can do. I’m helping generate their sales.
So, my colleagues testing suggests that the Office Professional edition does not support the SharePoint Workflow integration. We’re not sure though. But he did find that it worked in Enterprise edition. A long road, just to find that out.
Comments from my old blog:
We’ve had this discussion w/ Microsoft as well. FWIW: Office Pro Plus works w/ WF integration as well. Additional word of Caution: To use the InfoPath control for workflows, you will either need Forms Services running to run ASPX forms, or you will InfoPath on each client to run the Infopath control. It is very hard as a ISV to tell our users what “versions” of Office they must have installed to use our features. Marketing should go back to the KISS principle, so maybe people would want to upgrade! It would also be nice if the MS documentation stated things like “This feature is only available when these product sku is installed”.
