MS Unveils Office 2007, Multiple Versions

rfunches writes "MSNBC reports that Microsoft's next version of Office, now known as Office 2007 (previously code-named Office 12), will continue targeting the corporate audience through multiple versions of Office 2007. Versions announced include 'Office Professional Plus 2007' and 'Office Enterprise 2007.' From the article: '[Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007] will integrate capabilities of SharePoint, a collaboration program and Web portal that is designed to run over corporate networks and the Internet...and also incorporate Microsoft Office Communicator, a corporate instant messaging service.'"

Comments

Interoperability

[joelito_pr]

Anyone knows how well will it behave in that area, because the article dind't said anything about it

Office communicator

[iMaple]

The office communicator is one of the few products that I really like. I used a beta for ~3 months and (provided you have the infrastructure in place) it kicks ass. It integrates email, IM and phone in an amazing way (by email I mean Outlook , no you cant use pine :( ). Eg. If the outlook calendar shows that I have a meeting in my office , it will set the IM status to ('Busy, in a meeting') and switch off the phone ringer (and email me any voice messages). Then when I see a missed call, I just click on that person and select call, which switches on the phone speaker and dials out the number. Impressive , eh ?

Re:Do I forsee...

[ackthpt]

Everyone that is not working for a cash rich corporation probably.

I think it is Fear Of Not Having Every Feature which drives a lot of purchasing. Coming up with a tiered product line just ensures there will be more purchases of the top end product. They may as well name the Professional edition something degrading like 'Student' or 'Home'

Offices are getting sick of this

[Anonymous Coward]

My office is all but fed-up with the MS Word updates-every-few-years. We wont pay for it again, even the pres of the co said to forget about it. We need the cash in the bank to make it through the next few years, which are going to be stupidly tough.

As such, all files are to be in Word 2000 .doc format, .pdf, .txt, or html. Thats it. When we get unworking things from clients we reply that we were unable to process their doc, the reason why, and instructions on how to do it. Occasionally we get bitchy clients, but those people are bitchy no matter what we do. It doesnt change anything.

Maybe this will be a good segue into Open Office, which is becoming more viable every day.

Express Editions?

[edmicman]

What is the version for home users / smaller offices that don't want/need all the extra bells and whistles? I'd say 95% of any work is done in either Word or Excel. Why not have a "Basic" version of office that just includes those, maybe throw in Outlook, too?

I'm aware of abiword (that covers Word, what about Excel?) and OpenOffice (which I do like, although it has performance issues, some interface issues, etc. and in my prior experience still wasn't fully compatible with extensively formatted Word docs, but that's a topic for another time), but while you can substitute cheap or OSS products for Office, at this point in time nothing else IS Office. I would think a minimalist version of Office (even cut out those features that hardly anyone uses?) that was targeted cheaply (like the cost of a game) to students and home users would go over well.

Office monopoly is a thing of past

[octopus72]

Although I used OOO for writing my diploma thesis (later switched to latex), MS Office is still installed on my PC. Of course reason is I didn't really pay for it. There is even incentive in my country for students to be able to replace illegal copies of MS software at NO COST(!) for a license. Obviously, MS fears that enforcement will push people not wanting to pay onto free alternatives.
Reason I still have MS office is comatibility, mostily with powerpoint files. I doenload lot's of these from local newsgroup, and OpenOffice, apart from long startup time, doesn't render some correctly. One could probably also use free Excel reader from MS, I'm just not sure how well latest file versions are supported.

For creating slides, 2.0 version is very usable. It has everything I need (even good ppt export support), so I don't really need MS Office for production.

I will stick with Office 97, thank you very much!

[rubberbando]

Why rebuy something that already works just fine? In fact, I find that Office 97 runs faster/better than any of the newer versions I've used at work.

Each time I upgrade to a faster machine, I move my installation over to it. I noticed with Windows XP, the Office 97 installer crashes. After reading some boards online, I noticed that most people concluded that it wouldn't run/install on XP but after experimenting with the 'custom' install, I discovered that all you need to do uncheck the web import/export for Word and everything else will install just fine. Besides, who the heck uses Word to edit/create webpages anyway. :P

Re:Do I forsee... (tool alert)

[infochuck]

You know, I'm no Access apologist, but I smell ignorance and FUD:

"is horrible to use, the interface just blows"

Wow. How insightful and informative. "Horrible to use" - could you elaborate? "Interface just blows" - is that a technical term?

I find it quite easy to use, and the interface is very intuiutve. "Create New Database". Wow. That was tough. Enter column names in a table - ick!

Just because YOU don't understand it/don't see/can't see the places where it is simply 'the right tool for the job' doesn't make it so. It just makes YOU a tool.

Re:Do I forsee...

[xtracto]

I do not know why people bash Access like that. I have worked with access before as well as as with MS SQL Server and mySQL, I have used Postgre and Oracle only on non productive environments.

From all of those database engines, Access was the only one in which I could transport the data in a flash drive without any hassle (just copy de MDB file). I did not needed to install any program to show the database to other people using snapshot viewer.

Granted, it may not be good for databases that need to be accessed by more than one user each time but it is great to get orgainze a lot of data.

BTW, one of the things I did with access was to migrate some "!#$!"!@ Excel list database (they got a bunch of records and where managing them with excel data lists). It was very easy to create some tables on excel and import the data from excel.

Believe me, some buisness do not need anything more fancy than Access and it does the work, I think it is (as eeeeeevery other OS/app/language) just a tool and if used when it is needed it will do a great job.