Microsoft Plans New Server Products For Office v12

cbnet2004 writes "Microsoft Watch is reporting that when the upcoming Office 12 is released (what product reaches 12.0?), Microsoft will have a server version of Excel, Visio, and several other products along with it. So if you thought Microsoft was trying to dominate your desktop, now you'll have to watch out for your severs, too. According to the article, the new servers will fortunately not be for new "thin client" solutions."

Comments

Interesting to see how they will top that.

[damu]

Office has about 100% market share in business. MS is really facing an uphill battle with their new release it has to be better than anything they have released, and it seems that their ace card will be collaboration. Maybe a CVS type Office reposotory where you can access your documents or any documents by your company from anywhere. A way to link your profit excel sheet, with your word memo, with your inventory access database, with email to investors... We shall see.

Re:Interesting to see how they will top that.

[ConceptJunkie]

You mean something like Lotus Notes, but doesn't look and feel like mid-80's software developed by the Soviets?

Re:Interesting to see how they will top that.

[oni]

Office has about 100% market share in business. MS is really facing an uphill battle with their new release it has to be better than anything they have released,

I'm sorry, but that is not at all how it works.

MS will stop selling the old version, so when you buy a shiny new computer from Dell, you're going to get the new version of Office. When a business replaces a few of their computers, they will find subtle but noticable differences between the office suites.

Guess who always gets the newest computers. Management. So after a couple of instances where your boss sends you a powerpoint presentation and it doesn't look quite right, you're going to complain that you need the same version he or she has. voila. Everybody has the new version of office. It doesn't matter if it is any better than the old one. Hell, they could intentionally make it worse. It wouldn't matter. Nobody would notice because nobody uses the advanced features.

It always cracks me up when I suggest that someone try oppenoffice. "I don't want to learn something new," they say. But openoffice works exactly like MS office and you go to a new version of it every couple of years.

Re:Interesting to see how they will top that.

[oni]

any half-decent IT department wipes the disk and installs from a generic image.

That's correct - if you have a site license for office. I was once a halfway descent IT person in a company that did not have site licenses. I had a big binder with every license for every individual peice of software we owned (until Microsoft made that difficult by putting the license on a sticker on the side of the computer). Anyway, we got some new computers, and these actually didn't come with any office suite. I was prepared to put the same version of office on them that we had on every other computer. This was way back in '98 and we were still using the version before office 97. MS no longer sold the CDs but they were willing to sell me just licenses. But get this, they were more expensive than the new version. That was another incentive to upgrade. I bought them anyway and a few weeks later I got 1 (one) peice of paper in the mail from microsoft that said, "license for X copies of office." It didn't even have a cool hologram or anything.

So just to review, I paid hundreds of dollars to Microsoft so they could hit File/Print and stuff it in an envelope. You've got to love a company with a setup like that.

We won't see it as version 12.0

[rusty0101]

The next version of Office is going to be identified in accordance with whatever "outside" versioning system they decide to use when it is released.

It would not surprise me if they label it something like OfficeXP2, or even OfficeYQ.

Remember the version of Office that came out during the Win9x releases was labeled Office9x. Along with Windows2000 came Office2000. Along came WindowsXP, and up pops OfficeXP.

The Version 12.0 identifier is the internal identifier for Microsoft developers. It will show up in the 'About xxxx' screen, likely in the form 12.xxxx.yyyy, where xxxx and yyyy are design and build numbers.

-Rusty

You heard it here first

[sethadam1]

It will be OfficeFX and OfficeFX Server.

Just like Longhorn will be WindowsFX.

Yeah, Win32 is the basis of many versions of Windows, but it's clear that lettering is the current marketing buzz (Windows XP, Athlon MP, etc).

I can't wait to see this.

[nevlow]

Great. Now I'm going to have to keep up with even more weird revisions.

"What OS are you running?"

"Windows Longhorn 2005 Service Pack 5 Office Server Edition with Service Pack 6.5 for Athlon64."

"I'm sorry sir, we only provide patches for Windows Longhorn 2005 Service Pack 6 Office Server Edition with Service Pack 7 for Athlon64s."

"Damn!"

what product reaches 12.0?

[Kardamon]

As the submitter asked this :-)

Cisco IOS Release 12.0
Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.0 (Sybase ASE jumped from version 4 to version 10, leaving 5,6,7,8,9 to MS SQL Server)
Hardware Compatibility Test (HCT) 12.0
CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12.0
Corel WordPerfect Office 12.0
Domus.Cad 12.0
Palm Tipsheet 12.0
ALS Beamline 12.0
OmniPage Pro 12.0
SPSS for Windows 12.0
Laplink Gold 12.0
Etcetera...

Re:what product reaches 12.0?

[byolinux]

Emacs is on 21!

Re: what product reaches 12.0?

[BeatdownGeek]

(what product reaches 12.0?)

Ummm... Emacs, for one.

But I guess *nix users would argue that is their Office.

So, it's a licencing engine?

[Spoing]

I'm confused. If this isn't for thin clients, what technical/practical benifits do the 'server versions' of these apps provide?

Re:So, it's a licencing engine?

[hoggoth]

> what technical/practical benifits do the 'server versions' of these apps provide?

It's about time! How many servers out there are running a desktop Excel that is being COM controlled by a web application? Excel is NOT made to handle multiple simultaneous requests, and hangs, crashes, corrupts and does other nasty things when it is asked to.
I don't know how many times I've had to kludge together a solution to manipulating Excel spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations in a web server application. None of the solutions are perfect. Controlling Excel and Powerpoint with COM leads to an unstable solution. Emulating Excel or Powerpoint data leads to buggy data (since Microsoft actively tries to F* up anybody trying to emulate their data formats).

A server-capable Office engine would enable me to manipulate Excel, Powerpoint, and Word documents in a web application.