With the availability of the Office 2007 RTM “Bits” I felt it was necessary to go ahead and perform this “upgrade”. Actually it is not an upgrade at all. Upgrading is not an option. You are instructed to uninstall all Beta products before you attempt to reinstall any of the new stuff.

As an aside, I would really think long and hard about when you do this. Doing it at 3AM after a long day of work with two proposals, a contract, and a demo to build is not a good idea. One false move and you shoot any productivity out of the water. I had such false move.

While uninstalling Project 2007, which has been my nemisis since Beta 1, it spit at me with some error message, but still removed itself from Add/Remove Programs. I thought nothing of this at the time, but I believe, but have not conformed that this was my undoing. After what I thought was a successful untinstall of the 2007 Beta2TR Apps, I went ahead and ran the setup on Office again. I got the same error message stating that I cannot install the new product without uninstalling the Beta products first. So I go look in Add/Remove Programs again, since it is about 2:30AM at this point and sure enough everything was gone.

After a frustrating hour or so, I shut ‘er down and head to bed. I decide to tackle this after a full night of 2 or 3 hours sleep. After a morning conference call, I dive in. That’s when a team member of mine comes by and sees that I am inches from putting my hand through the screen over this and helps take a look. He walks away to do some research while I continue mine and sends me a link that has a link in it to this thread on the Google Groups. Thread #16 had the answer to our plans. I don’t know where specifically, but I think it was the “installer” part that fixed me up. I am now back up and running, thanks to Russ and some patience.

Thanks Mr. Bair!

It looks like the Microsoft Office team finally achieved their goal and have released their most current codeset for the 2007 Office System to Manufacturing. Here is the press release and here is a quick blog entry from Jensen Harris, who is a member of that team.