The Office Resource Kit is written for administrators, help desk technicians, and information systems (IS) professionals. It provides information about rolling out, supporting, and troubleshooting Microsoft® Office 97 on computers running Windows® 95, Windows NT® Server or Window NT Workstation, as well as Microsoft Office 98 for the Macintosh®.

In the past several years, IS departments have changed the way they treat desktop applications. Five years ago, for example, local area networks (LANs) were appearing throughout organizations. Individual departments, and even individual users, were deciding which desktop applications they would use based on the functionality of particular applications. Today, however, departments are increasingly interested in how well an application allows people to collaborate and share data within a workgroup or corporate intranet.

Two factors have contributed to this change. First, the use of LANs and wide area networks (WANs) is much more widespread, and IS departments are now managing them centrally rather than departmentally. Many organizations have intranets and provide access to the Internet. Second, in the autumn of 1993 Microsoft Office version 4.0 was launched.

Office 4.0 provided much more consistency and ease of use than was previously available in a group of integrated desktop applications. This encouraged many organizations to standardize on Office. In standardizing on a single, integrated solution, IS organizations came to appreciate the control they had over their departmental desktops; yet they also recognized the importance of supporting and maintaining this software to reap the benefits that standardization provides.

Office 97 for Windows and Office 98 for the Macintosh are arguably the largest upgrades in the history of Office in terms of new capabilities, workgroup and Internet support, and network installation and support options. The purpose of the Office Resource Kit is to provide the information that the IS professional or administrator needs to support Office. This includes planning for and deploying Office, deciding which configurations are best for your organization, and understanding what is involved in migrating from earlier versions of Office or from competitive applications.

Microsoft maintains a site on the Web that contains all of the text and graphics of the printed Office Resource Kit, as well as hyperlinks to the Tools and Utilities CD content. You have full access to this site (provided you have access to the Web).

Together, the Office Resource Kit and the Tools and Utilities provide you with a wealth of information and utilities for installing and supporting Office in your workgroup. The following sections describe each of these resources in more detail.

Using the Printed or Online Book

The following sections describe the contents of the Office Resource Kit. Each part of the book begins with a list of the chapters in that part; the first page of each chapter includes a table of contents for that chapter.

Part 1, Welcome to Microsoft Office

In addition to this chapter, Part 1 includes Chapter 2, "What's New in Microsoft Office." Use this chapter for a quick glance at the new features in Office 97 for Windows and Office 98 for the Macintosh and in the individual Office applications. Chapter 2 also explains which features of Office can better support collaboration and sound work practices in your workgroup.

Part 2, Deploying Microsoft Office

The chapters in Part 2 provide you with the details you need to install Office on end­users' computers — including steps for developing an installation strategy, such as assembling a planning team and rolling out a pilot project. You can allow users to install their own software, or you can install Office throughout your organization from an administrative installation point on the network.

Part 2 also describes how to customize client installations with tools such as the Microsoft Systems Management Server and Windows System Policy Editor. (The Office 97 policy templates are also included with the Tools and Utilities.)

Part 3, Upgrading to Microsoft Office

The chapters in Part 3 describe techniques for upgrading users' software to Office 97 for Windows and Office 98 for the Macintosh, whether users are upgrading all of Office or one or more of the individual Office applications. In addition, all of the Office applications include new capabilities for sharing documents with previous versions of Office. These capabilities are especially useful for workgroups that are upgrading gradually and must share documents among different versions of Office applications.

Part 4, Switching from Other Applications

The chapters in Part 4 provide detailed information about migrating users from other applications to their Office counterparts, such as from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, from Lotus 1­2­3 to Microsoft Excel, from Harvard Graphics to Microsoft PowerPoint®, or from dBASE to Microsoft Access. Part 4 includes information about filters that convert documents to the format of the destination Microsoft application, and it explains how Office applications manage documents and data that were created in other applications.

Part 5, Using Microsoft Office Throughout Your Organization

The chapters in Part 5 describe how to take advantage of the workgroup features built into Office, such as setting up corporate forms and templates and integrating Office applications and electronic mail. Office includes strong support for Internet and intranet protocols; these are also described in Part 5.

Part 6, Microsoft Office Architecture

The chapters in Part 6 provide an overview for IS managers and technical support personnel of the structure of Office and its applications. Use Part 6 as a starting point for troubleshooting problems or unexpected results in Office applications.

Appendixes

The appendixes provide detailed references for items included in the Tools and Utilities, Setup command­line options, registry settings, installed components, and resources for technical support.

Using the Tools and Utilities CD

The Tools and Utilities CD contains all of the software tools and utilities referenced in this book: the Network Installation Wizard, Office 97 policy templates for the Windows System Policy Editor, and many others. For a more detailed description of the Tools and Utilities CD contents, see Appendix A, "Microsoft Office Resource Kit Tools and Utilities."

Microsoft Office is a cross-platform product family. You can exchange documents between the Windows and Macintosh versions of Office, and generally features and functionality in one version are similar or identical to the same features and functionality in the other version. However, each Office version has some unique attributes and capabilities due to differences in operating systems.

Much of the content of the Office Resource Kit applies to both Office 97 for Windows and Office 98 for the Macintosh. To distinguish Windows-specific and Macintosh-specific information in this book, look for the following icons in the page margins.

The following terms and text formats are used throughout this book.

Convention	Meaning
Bold	Indicates the actual commands, words, or characters that you type or that you click in the user interface.
Italic	Indicates a placeholder for information or parameters that you must provide. For example, if the procedure asks you to type a file name, you type the actual name of a file.
Path\File name	Indicates a Windows file system path or registry key — for example, the file Templates\Normal.dot. Unless otherwise indicated, you can use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters when you type paths and file names.
Path:File name	Indicates a Macintosh file system path — for example, the file Template:Normal. Unless otherwise indicated, you can use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters when you type paths and file names.
Monospace	Represents examples of code text.

We welcome any feedback that you may have about the Office Resource Kit. We are especially interested in any technical errors or ambiguities you find in the book or in the Office Resource Kit Tools and Utilities.

You can contact us by sending e­mail to the following address:

ork97@microsoft.com

Although we will respond to your feedback as best we can, we cannot provide technical support for the Office applications. For information about obtaining product support for the Office applications, see "Getting Support from Microsoft" in Appendix E, "Other Support Resources."

We hope you find the Office Resource Kit a valuable tool for installing, supporting, and using Office in your workgroup. We appreciate your feedback, and good luck with Office!