Sooooo….the Microsoft Action Pack Q1 shipment arrives with Office 2007 Enterprise and Vista Business Edition upgrade. I spend 90 minutes digging bits of the Office 2007 beta 2 Technical Refresh out of my workstation before it allows me to install Office 2007.

Conversley, the Vista install has to be done over an existing XP install. WTF? That means if you want a clean install, you first have to install XP, then install Vista on top. This has to be a mistake, I’m sure that Bill’s boys and girls will be fixing this momentarily, right?

So I skipped Vista for now, and went with the Office 2007 Enterprise. This not only includes the usual suspects but a few others, like Groove, Expressions Web (The replacement for the unlamented FrontPage), Visio 2007, and a bunch of SharePoint stuff.

By my count there are at now at least three different technologies for “shared workspaces” offered by Microsoft; Groove, Sharepoint, and within some versions of Vista. Actually, four, because you can share OneNote notebooks in real time as well.

Before investing too much in the Microsoft versions, check out the Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet. I had a two-hour shared telephone conference with budget spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheet this morning, which worked out fine. It is a little funky when downloaded back into Excel, but it worked. And of course, we still like Backpack, I mean Basecamp.