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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.'"
So.. how many people are really likely to get the lightweight version, hmm?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are we getting some hot 'MS OFfice EX plus alpha' action soon? Maybe 'Super MS Office XII: Third Strike Champion Hyper Edition'?
Remember folks, try to reduce the stress on the main distribution site by using mirrors when possible, or even better, let's get a BitTorrent tracker going to distribute the load.
That can never be a good thing...
Employer 1: I seem to have lost the TSP report: Could you it to me ?
Employer 2: ASL?!?!
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 ?
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.
.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.
As such, all files are to be in Word 2000
Maybe this will be a good segue into Open Office, which is becoming more viable every day.
See, while Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 will only cost arm, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 will cost arm + leg.
Oh, and the premium edition, Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007...
you don't want to know.
I see you have received some bad corporate news..
Would you like to throw a piece of furniture?
1. Chair
2. Sofa
3. 18th Century French Armoir
Ahem...
Google Search for Open Source word Processor
Abiword for the lazy that does not want to look further.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The article fails to mention that FrontPage will become SharePoint Designer in Office 2007.
Yes, for some reason, office suites feel that they have to inculde everything. Most people don't need 90% of the features in there, or could get by without them if they weren't there. Also, putting tools where they shouldn't be makes things harder. You can draw a picture in Word, Powerpoint, Excel and every other app. Why not have 1 app for drawing, and then the ability to place that drawing in each of the other apps.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The thing is that unix names generally tell you what the function is;
grep = general regular expresssion parser
cat = concatenate
vi = (the odd one our here) The name comes from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command visual in ex
Office Plus & Office Enterprise really do not offer any clue to the differences by reading the name. Microsoft is missing the naming plot, wtf is "Windows Defender" I prefer "Microsoft Anti-Spyware" atleast now I know what it is defending against.
"It integrates MS Exchange/Outlook, MS Messenger and MS Phone in an amazing way."
And no, I don't want voice mail in my email. People store too much crap in it already.
"By contrast, the OSS community knew that names were better if they bore no linguistic connection to the actual function of the product. (grep, cat, and vi, I'm talking to you.)"
[I can't work out if you are being ironic - just in case you are not...I've put my marketing consultant hat on...]
Nah - they were handy for quick typing on a TTY - no more.
With most potential desktop Linux users likely to use a GUI, the name of the underlying executable is irrelevant and we have now moved on to a 'marketing' track where the name bears some relevance to the acceptability of the program - trust me, calling a graphics application 'The GIMP' does not make managers warm to it. Similarly, mentioning at meetings that we are using the 'Joomla' CMS always makes me slighly uneasy as I look round the room.
If OpenOffice was called ONMO (OpenOffice is Not Microsoft Office), for example, I bet its adoption would be slower - trust me, it *IS* an issue; why do you think companies spend thousands just getting the name, shape and theme of a new product 'just right'.
Trouble is that too many developers live in the world of Monty Python, Tolkein and Terry Pratchett and think it l33t to name their poducts with a nod to their favourite characters etc. - as a simple exercise, ask a Manager whether they think it would be easer to recommend to the Board of Directors that the organization should migrate to the 'BilboScript' Word Processor or 'MavenWord'. If you think it all comes down to the features comparison matrix you are sadly deluded - names matter, even if it's more of a knee-jerk reaction.
Oh, and PLEASE will someone rename Ogg Vorbis!!
AT&ROFLMAO
Corporate IM is actually becoming pretty popular. It replaces the need to quickly call or run over to someone to ask a quick question that email is overkill for (or that you need an immediate answer for). Lotus Notes has had an IM client (SameTime) in it for a little while now.
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.
Employee A -- "Cool! I got Excel, I'm gonna be a budget analyst!"
Employee B -- "I got Word! Awesome! I'm gonna write memos and be a manager."
Employee C -- "Shit, I got PowerPoint. But I don't want to be a consultant. They suck."
Employee D -- "You think you got it bad? I got Access, I'm never gonna get anything done."
...Sarbanes Oxley
Companies need to keep logs of pretty much everything these days. Plus with having a system running in-house you can firewall off other IM services and not worry about employees using IM for non-work uses.
Finally (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) it integrates perfectly into you existing outlook/exchange server directory.
I am NaN
I wonder why people are falling for this talk about "multiple versions" in Office 2007. The available retail versions of MS Office 2003, as listed on Microsoft.com
- MS 2003 Professional Ed.
- MS 2003 Standard Ed.
- MS 2003 Small Business Ed.
- MS 2003 Student & Teacher Ed.
And the versions of the upcoming Office 2007 as listed in the article
- Professional
- Standard
- Enterprise
- Small Business
- Home & Student
Guess what - all of one extra edition - "Enterprise" (Student & Teacher appears to have been rebranded as Home & Student). The way the article and the submission is written it would appear that multiple versions were the next best thing to sliced bread since, um, Office 2003?
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
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.
:P
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.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Much like the EA sports games, each released with a year appended to the title (Madden 2006, MLB 2006, Lawn Darts 2006) Microsoft should also follow the trend of stick a famous player of the game on the front in a menacing pose. I nominate Ballmer throwing a chair.
Oh, I'm sure it'll pretty effectively level them.
*rimshot*
Thanks folks, I'm here all week.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
People with really bad web sites?
"Why aren't I getting any phone calls for the past 4 hours"
"Because you show as busy in your calendar. You should get the voicemails as emails."
"What?! And where are the voicemails of which you speak?"
"You should be getting them."
"Do you see any in my email?"
"No....I see, you've forwarded your phone to your cellphone, so the voicemails will be forwarded to your PDA."
"But I don't have them in there? It says that the emails were truncated because the PDA omits attachemnts over 128kb."
"Oh then it would have dropped them off."
"So where are they?"
"Deleted. The PDA dropped them, and the voicemail server doesn't save them once sent."
"So they're gone? 4 hours of voicemails - gone?"
"Sorry, it looks like it"
"But I'm not busy in the first place?"
"Hmm...look, you got this email from your wife saying that it's Bill's birthday today."
"So?"
"She marked it as an all day event, when you accepted to add it to your calendar, it marked you as 'out all day'. Also, you're not going to get paid for today, we have our payroll integrated too."
"So let me see if I understand this, according to my accepting a birthday reminder, I've lost 4 hours of vital voicemails, automatically rejected any meeting requests since the system thought I was already in one, and in fact I'm not even going to get paid for today?"
"Yeah, sorry about that."
"So since I'm definitely 'not here', then I guess the police won't suspect me of killing you?"
"?"
-Styopa
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.
I'm only interested in... the Eye Patch version. Aargh.
MadOgre.com
Because that's what I need my malicious script friendly word processing software to be - network aware and readily capable of "sharing" with the rest of the corporate environment.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Does anyone here still prefer and use older versions like Office 2000? At home, I use 2000 version and it still does fine for my needs. I don't do fancy editings in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Sometimes I use OpenOffice especially in Linux and Mac OS X v10.2.8 (NeoOffice), but that's rare. At work, I have to use Office 2003 since it is required by IT. I don't like these newer versions (2002/XP, 2003, etc.).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here - though every bone in my body assumes YOU did something screwy, because I have NEVER had this problem - and not imply you're doing something screwy.
Instead I will point this out: the program screwed you over, yes; but not 'the interface'. The interface did what it was supposed to: helped you create a query to get at your data. If the other tiers screwed up, fine. After all Access is mostly crap. Yeah, I said it. It is; but it HAS ITS PLACE, and it's not crap beacuse of the interface; the interface is rather refined, and that was my original/main point.