Microsoft Office 2007 released for manufacturing

Microsoft has just announced that its latest Office Suite(build 4518.1014), has completed the code for its MS Office 2007 system and has gone gold. While this means is that the 2007 editions of MS Office have been released to manufacturing, it is not available for purchase at your nearest Best Buy yet. It just signals that the product does not have any major bugs or that it is relatively “bug free”.

“We’ve crossed the development finish line,” said Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, in a statement. “The 2007 Microsoft Office system RTM completes the most significant improvements to the products in more than a decade. It’s rewarding to be able to send this release off to our customers and help them take the next big leap forward in productivity.”

Microsoft stated that some of its enterprise customers will get Office 2007 as early as Nov 30th and for the rest of us, it won’t be available until sometime early 2007 along with Windows Vista operating system and 2007 Exchange e-mail server. There are five retail versions of the suite and if you want, you can check out pricing information posted on Microsoft’s Office online site. This follows similar upgrades to Microsoft’s Office website which AskStudent covered, couple of days ago.

Microsoft Office 2007 is a major overhaul for the best-selling productivity suite and differs significantly from its last release Office 2003. As always, Office suite includes MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook form the default components and other optional applications depending on your version. Upgrades include a totally redesigned UI built around a context sensitive “ribbon” that displays options and features formerly accessed via standard drop-down menus and toolbars. While some worried that the new Office suite means significant re-training for people, Microsoft contends that Office 2007 is its most intuitive release yet.

Other upgrades include

a. By default, Office 2007 documents will be based on XML formats allowing for greater compatibility with third party software

b. Free plugins to convert word documents to Adobe PDF standard

So, will Office 2007 bring into the $$$ to Microsoft? Totally… and will be the cash cow it always was for Microsoft. At the same time, Bill Gates and Co see Google and their Office suite in the rear view mirror. Would this be the last of the desktop based productivity suites like Windows Vista …. only time will tell.

Dear visitor, Happy New Year to you and thanks for dropping by. If you enjoyed reading this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!