Business Applications and Services

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

The Office suite, SharePoint Server, and related products will probably receive concurrent updates in late 2012 or early 2013, as part of an “Office 15” release wave that began testing by selected customers and partners in Jan. 2012. The wave will also include a major update to the Microsoft-hosted Office 365 services, which were launched in June 2011. (See the sidebar “Office 365 and BPOS“.)

Office Suite

The Office suite, Microsoft’s most widely used client application for business, enables document editing, data access and manipulation, e-mail, presentations, and collaboration. It ships in multiple editions that include combinations of the following applications:

Word (document creation)
Excel (spreadsheet)
PowerPoint (presentation)
Outlook (e-mail, calendar, and contacts)
OneNote (note-taking and collaboration)
Access (database management)
InfoPath (forms design and forms-based entry of XML data)
SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove, peer-to-peer collaboration

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