Well, it is official now. Microsoft released a press announcement with the details of the forthcoming version of the new Office. The new baby will be called '2007 Microsoft Office System'. A bit weird to actually say these words, it does not sound very sexy but hey! the product is very sexy.
Additionally, some details regarding the licensing are public now. As Brian nicely summarizes in his latest posting:
There are 3 new offerings that I wanted to call out:
- For volume license customers new capabilities in Office Professional Plus 2007 (an updated release of Pro EE) will include e-forms and ECM support, as well as the addition of Office Communicator
- Another option for volume license customers is the new Office Enterprise 2007 will build on the Professional Plus and integrate Groove and OneNote to deliver advanced collaboration and mobility solutions
- For the retail folks, the new Office Home and Student 2007 (an updated release of Student & Teacher Edition) don't require a student or teacher in the household and will replace Outlook with OneNote
There are also two new applications that you might have already heard about:
- Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a new offering that will help people create and customize SharePoint Websites and it also is great for building workflow-enabled applications on the SharePoint platform (This is cool, it's is partially based on FrontPage technologies)
- Office Groove 2007 which is an updated release of the Groove Virtual Office software. If you aren't familiar with Groove, you should really check it out. It helps enable teams to work together inside collaborative workspaces, regardless of their location or connectivity.