Office 2007 Pricing Finalized

Office 2007 has shipped to volume license customers, and final pricing has been revealed. The new pricing and packaging do not radically change costs for existing customers and bring the less-established OneNote and Groove Virtual Office products into the Office suite, making those applications more accessible to new customers.

Formerly code-named Office 12, the Office 2007 suite is a significant upgrade. New features include a new user interface intended to help users with less expertise exploit the product’s capabilities, a substantially improved version of the Excel spreadsheet application, and additional integration features for Microsoft’s SharePoint line of portal and content management products.

New Enterprise Suite for Volume Licensing

The main changes to the Office suite for volume customers include a new name for one suite and the addition of a new high-end suite. (For a summary of the packages, see the chart “Office 2007 Packages, Channels, and Prices“.)

Office 2007 Professional Plus is the successor to Office 2003’s Professional Enterprise Edition. Like Professional Enterprise, Professional Plus will include the four core suite applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) as well as Access, InfoPath, and Publisher. Professional Plus adds Communicator, which provides instant messaging and voice communication when used in conjunction with Microsoft’s Communications Server (formerly Live Communications Server).