What's in the Office System?

The term Office System refers to a collection of client applications, servers, online services, and solution accelerators. Like .NET, Office System is a broad term whose meaning has shifted over time; this chart shows the lineup as of Nov. 2003.

With the exception of Office and Exchange Server, all offerings here have official names with the prefix Microsoft Office. Client applications and servers also have a version year—Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, for instance.

Solution accelerators are packages of additional software and documentation designed to help enterprise customers, systems integrators, and solution providers build solutions for doing a particular task with Office System products. Those shown here are representative; many more are planned.

Finally, some important functionality of the Office System is enabled by add-on components to Windows Server 2003. In particular, Windows SharePoint Services provides important document and data sharing functions as well as infrastructure for the SharePoint Portal Server product, and Windows Rights Management Services enables users to protect content such as documents and e-mail messages and define what other users may do with the content. However, these components are not technically part of the Office System and do not share the Office System brand.