• Chart: Office 2007 Packages, Channels, and Prices

Office 2007 has shipped to volume license customers, and final pricing has been revealed. The new pricing and packaging do not radically change costs for existing customers and bring the less-established OneNote and Groove Virtual Office products into the Office suite, making those applications more accessible to new customers.

Formerly code-named Office 12, the Office 2007 suite is a significant upgrade. New features include a new user interface intended to help users with less expertise 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.

New Enterprise Suite for Volume Licensing

The main changes to the Office suite for volume customers include a new name for one suite and the addition of a new high-end suite. (For a summary of the packages, see the chart "Office 2007 Packages, Channels, and Prices".)

Office 2007 Professional Plus is the successor to Office 2003's Professional Enterprise Edition. Like Professional Enterprise, Professional Plus will include the four core suite applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) as well as Access, InfoPath, and Publisher. Professional Plus adds Communicator, which provides instant messaging and voice communication when used in conjunction with Microsoft's Communications Server (formerly Live Communications Server).

Office 2007 Enterprise Edition includes everything in Professional Plus and adds 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.

As before, Microsoft will also offer Office 2007 Standard in volume licensing. That edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as did Office 2003 Standard. An Office 2007 Small Business Edition includes the features of Standard and adds the Outlook Business Contact Manager customer tracking application, and the Publisher application for designing coordinated stationery, business cards, and Web sites. It also includes Accounting Express, a free edition of Microsoft's basic accounting package for small companies.

Office Small Business Management Edition, which included the full Small Business Accounting product, has been discontinued. Small Business Accounting has been renamed Accounting Professional, but it will not be included in any Office 2007 edition.

Customers who have upgrade rights through an Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Software Assurance (SA) will be able to purchase "step-up" licenses between editions (e.g., between Standard and Professional Plus) for approximately the price difference between the editions, as opposed to buying entirely new licenses at full price. In one 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.

SharePoint Integration Requires Higher Editions

As in Office 2003, four individual Office applications—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—will come in premium editions. (The premium editions were once called Word Professional, Excel Professional, PowerPoint Professional, and Outlook Professional, but Microsoft no longer uses those names.)

The premium features include the following extra functions.

SharePoint Server workflow support allows users with the premium editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 to start and run an automated document review process or other workflows hosted by SharePoint Server, Microsoft's portal, content management, and team collaboration product. Users of the standard edition Office applications 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 from inside their Office applications.

Publishing spreadsheets and slides. Users of the premium edition of Excel 2007 can publish Excel worksheets to SharePoint's Report Center and define which cells can be viewed or edited by others. Also, users of the premium version of PowerPoint 2007 can save PowerPoint presentations, templates, or individual slides to a slide library hosted by SharePoint, allowing other users to build new presentations from existing content rather than creating them from scratch.

Document barcodes can be generated from document metadata, such as subjects, keywords, or customer numbers, from within the premium editions of Office 2007 applications. Labels and barcodes can be embedded within documents and can be printed and updated automatically. This capability complements sorting and filing of documents by automated document management systems.

Rights management features (which were also included in Office 2003 premium application editions), allow users to 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 applications with the premium features are required to add protection to documents or change the protections already on a document. The feature requires Windows Rights Management Services, a separate service of Windows and Windows Server that requires additional Client Access Licenses (CALs).

InfoPath 2007 forms can be embedded in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and in programmable task panes. In addition, Outlook 2007 Professional enables users to embed InfoPath forms in e-mail, fill out e-mailed forms they receive, and extract and organize data from completed forms. All of these features require InfoPath 2007 on the client computer.

The standard editions of Word and Excel will support one important feature that they did not support in Office 2003: the ability to import and export XML data that conform to a custom XML schema. The standard editions of Word and Excel 2003 could import and export XML only if it conformed to a fixed, Microsoft-defined schema. Support for custom XML schemas 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), because Office will be able to import and export data in the schemas used by the Web services.

Volume license customers can purchase the premium application editions in the Office 2007 Professional Plus and Enterprise suites. Customers who purchase Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook as stand-alone applications also receive the premium editions. However, customers who have EA or SA coverage on Office Standard will need to purchase step-up licenses to the Professional Plus and Enterprise suites in order to use the premium editions. (This is a change: Office XP Standard customers with SA were granted the right to use the premium editions of the Office 2003 applications that were part of their Office suite.)

Small Changes to Retail and OEM Lineup

The Office 2007 lineup for retail and OEM customers includes two notable changes: a new high-end Ultimate Edition and removal of premium capabilities from Professional. The company has also altered its low-cost offering for home users.

Office 2007 Ultimate offers all of the Office applications except Communicator. It includes the premium editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Ultimate could interest users for laptops that move between business and home.

Office 2007 Professional now includes the standard rather than premium editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and so cannot be used as a client for SharePoint workflow or to protect documents using Windows Rights Management Services, among other capabilities. Retail and OEM customers who want these capabilities will have to buy Office Ultimate.

Office 2007 Home and Student includes OneNote in place of Outlook. As with Office 2003, this edition is inexpensive (estimated retail price of US$149) and allows installation on up to three PCs. The household need not include a student, but the software cannot be used in commercial environments. Office 2007 Home and Student requires Windows XP SP2 or later.

OneNote, Groove for the Masses

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 the software 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

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

Groove is summarized in "Groove to Get Push from Office 2007" on page 25 of the Nov. 2006 Update.

OneNote 2007 features are previewed in "OneNote Goes Mainstream" on page 13 of the Sept. 2006 Update.

Packaging and licensing for Exchange, SharePoint Server, and other servers are explained in "Exchange 2007 Packaging, Licensing, and Pricing" on page 3 of the Jan. 2007 Update, "Office Server Line Taking Shape" on page 5 of the Mar. 2006 Update, and "Client Access Licenses Split Server Features" on page 3 of the Mar. 2006 Update.