Business Applications and Messaging

The next major release of Microsoft’s Office suite, code-named Office 12, is currently planned to arrive in 2006, and many of its features will be announced at the Sept. 2005 Professional Developers Conference. The Exchange Server e-mail and collaboration product will is also due for a late 2006 or early 2007 update, with improvements for unified messaging (such as voice mail) and enforcing corporate messaging policies.

Office Suite, Visio, OneNote

Microsoft’s most widely used client application for business, the Office suite, supports document editing, data access, e-mail, presentations, and collaboration.

(For a graphical overview of recent and upcoming business application releases, including the Office suite, OneNote, and Visio, see the illustration “Office Suite, Visio, and OneNote Overview“. For an overview of Office 2000 and XP versions, including service pack release history and life-cycle support dates, see the chart “Past Office Versions“.)

Office 2003

The most recent version of the Office suite, Office 2003, was released in Oct. 2003. Office 2003 delivers better support for collaboration through integration with the Windows SharePoint Services Web site hosting and document management service, improves support for “smart client” application development through import and export of XML data conforming to custom schemas, and enables control of document and e-mail distribution through Windows Rights Management Services.