Business Applications

The current version of Microsoft’s Office suite, Office 2007, was released to corporate customers in late 2006. It has been 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.

Office Suite and Visio

Microsoft’s most widely used client application for business, the Office suite, supports document editing, data access, e-mail, presentations, and collaboration. The Office suite and the Visio business diagramming product received major releases in 2006. These versions do not require Windows Vista, but they do require Windows XP SP2 or later, and thus are not supported on Windows 2000.

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