The Office suite's next version will include a new high-end edition for volume license customers, while looser licensing on a low-priced consumer edition could draw more consumers into upgrades. The new packaging does not radically change costs for existing customers, and brings the less-established products OneNote and Groove Virtual Office into the Office suite, making those applications more accessible to new customers.

New Enterprise Suite for Volume Licensing

Formerly code-named Office 12, the Office 2007 suite is a significant upgrade. New features include a new user interface intended to help less-expert users exploit the product's capabilities, a substantially improved version of the Excel spreadsheet application, and additional integration features for Microsoft's SharePoint line of portal and content management products. Organizations that purchase Office 2007 through volume licensing will note the following changes to packaging:

Office Professional Plus replaces Office Professional Enterprise Edition. The successor to the Office 2003's Professional Enterprise edition will be called Professional Plus. Like Professional Enterprise, Professional Plus will include all the major suite applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) as well as Access, InfoPath, and Publisher. However, Professional Plus will also include Communicator, which provides instant messaging and voice communication like the built-in Windows Messenger client of Windows XP, but offers improvements in the user interface, directory integration, and telephony features. Microsoft will price Office 2007 Professional Plus at roughly 5% more than Office 2003 Professional Enterprise, but customers who have covered the Office Professional Enterprise on an Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Software Assurance (SA) can upgrade to Professional Plus at no charge.

New Enterprise suite edition. A new edition, Office 2007 Enterprise, will include everything in Professional Plus and add the OneNote note-taking application and Groove Virtual Office, which enables file sharing, instant messaging, and other forms of collaboration in "virtual workspaces" that do not require a central server. Office 2007 Enterprise will cost about 20% more than Professional Plus, offering a significant discount over purchasing Groove and OneNote standalone. EA and SA customers will be able to purchase "step-up" licenses from Pro Plus to Enterprise for approximately the price difference between the editions, as opposed to buying entirely new Enterprise Edition licenses at full price. In a break from past policy, EA customers will be allowed to purchase Office Enterprise for only some of their desktops; normally, customers covering Office on an EA were expected to license a single edition for all desktops.

As before, Microsoft will also offer an Office 2007 Standard edition in volume licensing. That edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as did Office 2003 Standard.

New XML Capabilities in Standard Applications

As in Office 2003, four individual Office applications—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—will come in Professional editions as well as less powerful standard ones (not formally named). The Professional applications will ship in the Office 2007 Pro Plus and Enterprise suites and will also be available standalone. Customers who have SA or EA coverage on Office Standard will also be allowed to upgrade to Word 2007 Professional, Excel 2007 Professional, PowerPoint 2007 Professional, and Outlook 2007 Professional without charge, although they will have to purchase step-up licenses to get the full Pro Plus or Enterprise suites.

Several Office 2007 features will require the Professional applications, including the following:

Rights management. Like Office 2003, Office 2007 supports rights management features, in which a user can create protected Office documents that impose restrictions (such as "do not print") that will be enforced on any computer. As in Office 2003, the standard applications can view and change protected documents (when allowed by the restrictions), but the Professional applications are required to add protection to documents or change the protections already on a document.

Form hosting and processing. In Office 2007, Word Professional, Excel Professional, and PowerPoint Professional documents can embed forms managed by InfoPath 2007. In addition, Outlook 2007 Professional enables users to embed forms in e-mail, fill out e-mailed forms they receive, and extract and organize data from completed forms.

SharePoint integration. Office 2007 delivers many new features for integration with SharePoint Server, some of which require the Professional applications. For example, users with Word Professional can start and run an automated document review and routing process in Word, using the new workflow features of SharePoint Server. Standard Word users can participate in such processes through a browser (for example, approving a document and sending it on to the next reviewer in the process), but not inside Word.

However, in Office 2007 the standard applications will support one important feature that they did not in Office 2003: the ability to import and export XML data that conforms to a custom XML schema. In Office 2003, standard applications could only import and export XML in a fixed, Microsoft-defined schema. This feature will be of particular interest to organizations that want to use Office as a front end to Web services that host corporate data (such as data from customer relationship management systems), as Office will be able to import and export data in the schemas used by the Web services.

OneNote for the Masses

On the consumer and small business side, the most notable packaging change concerns the company's retail offering for consumers. Office 2007 will offer a US$149 Home and Student Edition that replaces the US$149 Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition. However, as its name implies, Home and Student will be licensed for any home user, not just students and educators. However, unlike its predecessor, Office 2007 Home and Student will lack Outlook. Instead, it will ship with OneNote, a digital note-taking application that's particularly useful for students. By removing Outlook from the suite, Microsoft makes it less likely that consumers will get hooked on the advanced calendar and task management features of its premium e-mail client. However the move could boost the Web-based mail and calendar services of Office Live and Windows Live, currently in beta testing and planned for release in 2006.

In general, potential corporate customers of OneNote and Groove Virtual Office benefit the most from the Office 2007 packaging changes. These applications were previously available only as stand-alone purchases, an expensive and complicated way to buy for large numbers of users. The new Office enterprise edition offers substantial discounts on these less-established applications, giving them a better chance of reaching critical mass inside organizations.

Resources

For details on SharePoint Server and other Information Worker product licensing, see "Office Server Line-Up Taking Shape" and "Client Access Licenses Split Server Features".

Communicator is described in "Taking Another Stab at Telephony" on page 9 of the Oct. 2005 Update.

Groove Virtual Office is outlined in "Groove Buy for Collaboration " on page 16 of the Apr. 2005 Update.

For a OneNote overview, see "OneNote Joins Office System" on page 19 of the Oct. 2003 Update and "OneNote Service Pack Adds Features" on page 26 of the July 2004 Update.

Details of Office 2007 pricing and packaging are at www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/feb06/02-15OfficeMoreOptionsPR.mspx. (See "Fact Sheets" in the right panel of the page.)

The Office 2007 preview Web site is www.microsoft.com/office/preview.