Microsoft Releases Office 2007 Details

Office 2007 to be released late 2006
Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 17 Feb 2006

Microsoft's forthcoming Office suite has shed its Office 12 codename and official received its new "2007 Microsoft Office" moniker.

The productivity suite is currently in beta and is slated for release by the end of this year. A second beta has been promised before June.

The most visible enhancement to the suite is the new user interface that the company first demonstrated at the Professional Developer Conference last year in Los Angeles. Menu buttons are set to change according to the task that the user is performing, eliminating the need to dive into pull down menus when searching for the appropriate item.

The launch will also see the introduction of the first major release of the Groove Virtual Office collaboration suite since the application was acquired by Microsoft last April. Since the acquisition, the Groove's founder Ray Ozzie has been appointed Chief Technical Officer and is the architect of Microsoft's Live Software initiative.

Microsoft plans to make available seven editions of the suite. Consumer and small business will see few if any changes, but the software maker has created a new version catering to enterprises called Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007.