Introduction

Imagine waking up one morning and finding everything you knew, or thought you knew, had been flipped over 180°—the sun was green, the sky orange, and you were suddenly no longer a seasoned computer professional but instead a 10-year-old kid sitting in elementary school again. That’s kind of how most of us felt when we sat down in front of Office 2007 for the first time—or the first few dozen times.
It’s a whole new ballgame. Once the shock begins to wear off, however, you can see some glimmer of hope. Things are different, certainly, but not so different that you can’t function. There are some interesting new kids on the block but most of your old friends are still around—just pimped out in some fancy new clothes. You still use Word to produce documents, Excel to crunch numbers, and SharePoint to collaborate and share content. They just look and act a little differently. Hopefully, that’s where you are when you start reading this book. Are the Office 2007 client applications different from what came before them? Yes, absolutely. Is the Office 2007 System— server and client—better than what came before? Again, the answer is a resounding yes. Continuing on with my somewhat lame analogy, Workflow is just one of those new kids on the block. Workflow is the kid who somehow makes everything else better. Sure, you’ve got an Xbox 360, but the new kid has the wireless controllers and the big screen HD TV to play it on. Could you play Xbox before? Sure. But once you’ve sipped from the fountain, there’s no going back. Workflow is the same way. There’s very little in Office 2007 Workflow that you couldn’t do before, either manually, with a third party product, or with a homegrown solution. Office 2007 Workflow just makes it all easier, faster and better in every way—everything tastes better on an Office 2007 workflow...