According to ZDNet, Microsoft could release Office 2007 SP1 the week of December 10. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley cites sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's release window. Microsoft's previous official statements leaned towards an early 2008 release, making this an early Christmas (or late Hanukkah) present for users.

Last week, the SharePoint Server 2007 team blog suggested that SP1 was ready, leaving some to speculate an early release. A clarifying blog post re-stated the early-2008 release plan, adding that the product could be released anytime between now and Q1 2008.

So hedging release date issues aside what will be new in Office 2007 SP1? Well, although the beta has been unusually secretive (something we can attest), the SharePoint blog post and this post (also from ZDNet) give us some ideas.

In addition to the usual bug fixes and compatibility issues, WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 are reported to include AJAX support and new STSAdm commands. Looking at the list of SharePoint Server SP1 hotfixes, it looks like some of the bugs in Outlook/Exchange server, for example, the delayed event timers due to DST, have also been fixed.

Hopefully, these rumors are true, and Office 2007 SP1 will be out before the end of the year. As we mentioned in episode 3 of the Squadcast, we think it is in Microsoft's best interest to get the SP1 product updates (across the board) out sooner rather than later, as their release can only spur companies to upgrade their office suites, which like Vista, have lagged in comparison to prior releases. Furthermore, meeting or even beating an estimated release date can create an enormous amount of customer goodwill, especially since Microsoft is notorious for being late to the party, and not early.

Microsoft will be announcing plans later today to offer a bargain basement $3 version of Windows as well as Office 2007 exclusively to people in developing countries as part of the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Program. The program aims to double the amount of worldwide PC users by 2015 and thinks one of the keys to doing that is cheap software.

Countries like Brazil, Nigeria, and Argentina have turned to using Linux systems presumably for their free price tag. By offering XP Starter Edition (What? They couldn't spring for Vista?) and Office 2007 in a $3 bundle they hope to get people hooked on Microsoft products and gain long-term users. The software will be given to countries governments where it can then be distributed to schools as well as individuals within the country. There are also plans to offer the discounted software to low-income areas in the US as well as other nations. Malaysia and Thailand were previously offered a similar bundle for $30.

Even with the huge price cut on Windows, basic machines with the bundle are estimated to cost around $300 according the NY Times which is still a decent chunk of change.

[Via Personal Computer World]

Microsoft Office 2007 is big, bloated and brilliant. There is a plethora of new features for PowerPoint, Word, Excel (the jewel in the crown) and Outlook, my other husband. Microsoft recently brought the 2007 show local and I couldn't resist spending an intimate day with hundreds of other geeks. When the demonstrator's overloaded power laptop blue-screened, the crowd of small business owners cheered. We're a testy bunch when it comes to ROI on computer purchases.

Office 2007 runs on either Windows XP or Vista. The changes we saw were primarily cosmetic but productively important: when it takes employees a while to re-learn what they already know how to do, we lose money on the learning curve. (Using Outlook as a business contact manager was a large part of the demo and deserves its own post.)

The Ribbon
The most user-challenging feature will be the "Ribbon," which replaces the two friendly toolbars we know, love and customize.

Office 2007 is intuitive. The ribbon morphs unasked into the tasks it thinks you want to do next (called "contextual tabs"). If you're in a table, it moves to table commands in a disconcerting and resource-sucking visual blip. I predict we're going to lose monitors due to thrown objects caused by ribbon morphing, but right-clicking is a better alternative. Microsoft promotes it with '[T]he tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications.' Remember that the question of relevancy is highly individual with power users.

Going Home
The Home button provides easy access to the most frequently used Office commands. To new 2007 users, it's an extra click, a superfluous layer, another mouse move but in reality, it's the place to click to share, print, publish, and send documents.

Emailing files
Do you send Word or Excel files? Word 2007 saves in a new format (no more .doc) and you'll have to "save as" an "older" version (that'd be XP, which is lumped into Office 95 as an antique format) to share with those not yet blessed with Office 2007. A happy new feature is "save-to-PDF" and sending PDF files is the best choice anyway. Recommendation: send PDF files whenever possible.

Do you have the techno-horsepower?
Upgrading your current Office version might be cheaper than buying new, but it is time-consuming to load, resource-intensive and requires more RAM and better video (especially if you're considering Vista). Office 2007 is exceptionally graphical (and resource-intensive). In preparation, we upgraded our machines from 1Gb to 3Gb of RAM (older RAM costs less) and double-checked the video cards to make sure they had at least 128Mb of on-board RAM (we replaced only two because we knew it was coming 2 years ago). Call your IT folks and talk it all over before buying Office 2007 or Vista.

The money question
Does your business need Office 2007 with its bells, whistles, contextual tabs, galleries and Ribbon now? At the demo, the leader pointed out that things the "geeks" could do are now available to "regular" users like 'us' (well, them). The quandary: those things were always available and regular users could rarely do them so what makes you think they're going to start doing them now because they're prettier?

The bottom line
The reviews are in. ZDNet advises that if your current version works, don't upgrade even though there are significant improvements to Excel formula referencing, pretty PowerPoint, and better document recovery. They note that the drastic design changes demand a steep learning curve and the new interface isn't intuitive.

If you've got power users, they're going to love Office 2007. Regular users will face a learning slippery incline (not quite a steep curve). Your costs for both software and people frustration may vary.

Information Week reports that Microsoft could be unnecessarily eliminating support for Windows 2000 and older systems from new software releases.

A number of new Microsoft programs, such as Office 2007 and the new Zune software won't install on Windows 2000 systems. While some programs are truly designed with newer operating systems in mind, it appears Microsoft has intentionally blocked some programs from running on older systems.

For example, Windows Defender won't install on Windows 2000 systems. But if you futz a bit with the installer program, it appears that Defender checks to see what version of Windows you're using. If you're not using XP or a newer operating system it won't install. But some users have reported that you can modify the installer, and Defender actually runs quite well on Windows 2000.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Microsoft no longer supports Windows 2000. The company only provides 5 years of support for most consumer software. But it's a step further to intentionally cripple software compatibility, presumably to convince users to upgrade their operating system every five years -- even if they're not experiencing any problems with their existing OS.

[via Slashdot]

Microsoft officially announced the launch of Windows Vista for business customers yesterday, and expects more than 200 million users will be working with this new version by the end of 2007. At a presentation on Thursday, Steve Ballmer said that Vista, along with Office 2007 and Exchange server will be "game-changing".

With all of the delays, and the consumer version not being released until the end of January, Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOM asks whether or not we care about the launch. Personally, I couldn't really care less. Knowing Microsoft's track record, there will undoubtedly be some unfilled holes in the OS, and I will be in no rush to test it out until the first few fixes are released. But you never know--Microsoft might surprise us this time.

You can check out a webcast of Steve Ballmer's presentation on the Microsoft Window's Vista website.

So, what do you think? Will you be prepared to install Vista at its consumer release out in January?

So you're a software developer and want your program to have a shiny "ribbon" interface just like Office 2007? Well, guess what--Microsoft patented the hell out of it! This should not surprise anybody. However, there is good news for developers, or some of them, at least. Microsoft has announced that it has "created a royalty-free licensing program that will enable developers to build applications that have the look and feel of the new 2007 Office system applications." The license is perpetual, meaning once Microsoft grants you the license it can't turn around and revoke or change it later on. However there are, as you might imagine, some "guidelines" Microsoft wants you to follow when building your own ribbony apps, and they take the form of a 120-page document. Though the deal sounds largely positive for software developers, there is one significant catch: Microsoft won't license their ribbon UI patents for products that compete directly with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access. This is a sensible move for Microsoft, but a bummer for the makers of competing products who stand a lot to gain from making products that look and act just like the dominant office suite in the marketplace.

You can check out the press release and a canned interview about the new licensing program at the link above, but I heartily recommend you skip it and instead head over to Jensen Harris' blog. Harris is Microsoft's Group Program Manager for the Office UI and lays everything out in plain English. He also links to a preview of the guidelines (you have to sign an NDA to get at the full 120-page document) and a Channel 9 video in which he talks to Microsoft laywer Judy Jennison about the program.

Microsoft has completed Microsoft Office 2007, and it will be released for download on December 1st for US and Canadian residents. As for users in other parts of the world, there will be 13 countries, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Mexico, that will be able to download a free 60-day trial later in December. Retails stores will not see Office 2007 until early 2007, missing the giant Christmas buying season. The price for the new Office will sit at $239 for a standard home use version, and $399 for an upgraded full retail version. An Ultimate version will also be available that will cost $679 and of course, will be loaded with features. Some interesting stats about the new Office 2007 version: it will feature 50,000 new help articles, 35 new demos, 24 online training courses, and 400 templates.

Over at the Windows Vista Team Blog they're showing off some renders of the new retail packaging that Windows Vista and Office 2007 will be shipping in. Is this news? Well... no. But the packages are pretty and clearly show the direction Windows is going in, i.e. away from this and toward this. Says Microsoft's Nick White: "Designed to be user-friendly, the new packaging is a small, hard, plastic container that's designed to protect the software inside for life-long use. It provides a convenient and attractive place for you to permanently store both discs and documentation." Microsoft intends to extend the same style to the rest of its product lines in the coming year.

Check out some bigger pix after the jump.

Update: Reader Don alerts us that Neowin.net has some additional shots, including Vista Ultimate, Home Premium, and Business. I've updated the images above and below the cut to include them.

One thing we've heard about Office 2007's new "ribbon" menu system is that it's pretty big, and Microsoft apparently was hearing that a lot, too. Microsoft says that in the next beta release of Office 2007, the ribbon--which our own Ryan Carter praised in his video review earlier this week--will have an auto-hide option to make it disappear from view when not in use. Microsoft Australia's John Hodgson also says Microsoft is working on tools to make migrating to Office 2007 easier for businesses. "We've been asked by a lot of customers to provide tools to do mass migrations," Hodgson said. "There will be tools that will take a million documents and migrate those to the new formats." Microsoft says that Office 2007's new XML-based file formats produce 75% smaller files than previous versions.

Really, honestly, you want people to pay you $1.50 for the download of your poorly dubbed Office 2007 system (small "s")? What good will that do? How does that encourage the download and successful beta testing of one of your biggest cash cows, hmmm Microsoft? This will promote piracy of the beta (sad, isn't it). This will also make current "free beta" testers mad at you (like me). I think the new Office (2007 system) is pretty good. Perhaps the best to date, this Office really does have it's charms. The whole $1.50 charge thing not included of course. Here's the 64 million dollar question, why not use BitTorrent or something? C'mon, everybody (else) is doing it. Be like the cool kids, Microsoft, please? I suppose what Microsoft decides to do is their prerogative, but having an opinion is mine. Sorry everyone, Microsoft has downgraded this download from FREE to paid. $1.50 isn't much, but we're talking about a 1/3 of a latte here. That, in my book is serious business.

Microsoft is planning on buying back 8% of its total stock due to a falling net income in the fourth quarter.

This stock buyback will add to the already $30 billion it has already bought back in the past year alone. Microsofts income has reported to have dropped from $3.70 billion to $2.83 billion, mostly die to the growing number of legal expenses incurred over the past while.

Microsoft's expects booming profits come the release of its much anticipated Microsoft Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows Vista later this year. Hopefully. How many times have they changed the release date on us so far?

Overtype mode, i.e. the way Microsoft Office apps, in particular Word, will overwrite text in front of the cursor as you type, without so much as a beep, if you happen to have pressed your Insert key, has long been the scourge of typists the world over, and for a good long time there's been real no reason for its existence at all. Finally Microsoft seems to have realized this, as according to Jan Miksovsky at flow|state, Office 2007 will have overtype mode, no matter how many times you press the Insert key, disabled by default. Of course, there's still a preference to re-enable the "feature" since, as Miksovsky says, "with a user base the size of Microsoft's, it's virtually guaranteed that a large corporate customer has a vocal department that swears they need Overtype mode, so dropping the mode was probably out of the question." Now, can we get rid of the CAPS LOCK key, next?

Speaking of new looks, Microsoft's design site (which I didn't even know existed) has a page on some of the new design elements in Office 2007. We've heard plenty about the ribbon, of course, but the site also goes over Office 2007's three themes (sky blue, OS X silver, and Vader black), as well as the new application icons that are coming soon to a desktop near you. Office 2007's new aesthetic is certainly striking and will no doubt serve Microsoft well in catching eyes. But I'm still not sold on that odd circle menu, and chrome and gradients are nothing new. I'm almost surprised that they didn't throw in a little wet floor effect just for good measure.

There's a reason Microsoft called the next version of its office suite Office 2007 despite its projected October 2006 release date, and this is it. To nobody's surprise, Microsoft has pushed its release date back to early 2007 "based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance." It has also pledged to deliver a "system release" (which I think means for OEMs) of Office 2007 by the end of this year.

[Via Slashdot]

Want to give Office 2007 Beta a try but don't want to bother downloading it? You're in luck, because Microsoft is doing a Test Drive program which lets you try the product in your web browser. Well, their web browser-unsurprisingly it's IE-only and requires you install a plugin and sign in with Passport. If the server is busy (and it is right now) you'll be put in a queue, but my estimated wait of 35 minutes turned out to be 5. The real wait was for the thing to load, but after about 10 minutes and few hiccups, it did. Once it's loaded you can play around with live, working copies of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Publisher, Visio, InfoPath and SharePoint. Microsoft provides a tutorial for each, which is nice for getting acquainted, but if you just want to poke around you can kill the tutorial easily. There's a lot to see, and if you've been on the fence about Office 2007, this test drive will probably tip you one way or the other.

[Via Netscape]