Introduction

The Office suite is the essential business tool for creating and editing documents and e-mail. The Office 2007 suite, released to businesses late in Nov. 2006, offers mainstream users better-looking documents with less work and makes major improvements to Excel for charting and large-scale calculation. However, Office 2007 also delivers the biggest changes to the product’s user interface (UI) and technology since Office 2000. Thus, organizations will have to evaluate and test Office 2007 more carefully than they have tested previous Office versions, and many will want to roll out the product at the same time they deploy Windows Vista and new desktop computers.

Suite Improvements Without New Servers

Office 2007 has a different focus than Office 2003, the previous version of the suite. Office 2003 delivered few changes to the suite’s applications other than the Outlook e-mail client. However, Office 2003 introduced many features for collaboration, document management, and business data access in conjunction with new server products, such as SharePoint Portal Server (now called SharePoint Server).