Do you know that you can't use 2010 Managed Metadata with Office 2007 out of the box?

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 ships with a fantastic document management feature "Managed Metadata Service". This new service provides first class support for enterprise taxonomy within a standard SharePoint 2010 environment.

Unfortunately, Office 2007 and Office 2003 can't work with managed metadata fields out of the box. Office 2010:1. Works fine

Office 2007:1. Document information can't display managed metadata 2. You can still save documents to SharePoint 3. But you can't check-in (if metadata fields are required) 4. User needs to perform a web check-in

Office 2003:1. Can't create new or Open documents with managed metadata 2. Install Office 2007 document support upgrade, this bring the experience a bit better similar to Office 2007.

Best Solution:

Use a 3rd party solution - the best one being OnePlaceMail which provides a UI for managed metadata via the "Save to SharePoint". Works with all three versions of Office so users get a consistent UI.

Figure: The optional save dialog that pops up when saving document to SharePoint - allowing use of Managed Metadata from Office 2003, 2007 and File Explorer