Business Applications and Communications

Business applications including the Office suite, Visio, OneNote, Project, and Project Server. Also includes the Duet access product for SAP’s mySAP suite, the Exchange Server e-mail and collaboration product, the Live Communications Server instant messaging and presence platform, and related messaging, voice, and conferencing products.

The next major release of Microsoft’s Office suite, Office 2007, is currently planned to arrive in late 2006. It will be accompanied by a wave of updates to related products, including the Project and Project Server enterprise project management products; the SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services Web site, portal, and document management systems; and the OneNote and Visio productivity products. The Exchange Server e-mail and collaboration product is also due for a late 2006 or early 2007 update, with improvements for unified messaging (such as voice mail) and enforcement of corporate messaging policies.

Office Suite, OneNote, and Visio

Microsoft’s most widely used client application for business, the Office suite, supports document editing, data access, e-mail, presentations, and collaboration. A major release of the Office suite as well as the OneNote and Visio clients is planned for 2006. These upcoming versions will not require Windows Vista, but will require Windows XP SP2 or later, and thus will not be supported on Windows 2000.