Everything official about it

Office 2007 is due soon, but will it be different in any significant way from Office 2003?

Microsoft Office has been an office "" and even home "" software standard for some 15 years. The software suite, which includes all sorts of office-use tools, has a user base close to half a billion around the world, and has versions for Mac users too.

Towards the end of 2006, however, Microsoft will be urging all those users to move up to the latest version, Office 2007. The last big upgrade, if you recall, was Office 2003.

Office 2007 is quite different, claims Microsoft. To begin with, it will have a whole new graphical user interface (GUI), Ribbon, to replace the old drop-down menus.

"Users can be expected to pull up short when they first open an application and in a fit of panic wonder where everything has disappeared," jokes a Microsoft spokesperson, "All the menus and toolbars you currently use are gone, and have been replaced by the new Ribbon interface."

The toolbars, too, will be better. Plus, there will be plenty of new add-ons to adapt the suite to the modern networked office. "For the first time," says Chris Capossela, corporate vice-president, information worker product management group, Microsoft, "the product introduces a server for Office, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This will help enterprises share particular data files and information with specific people on the network, modify the contents and thereby protect the data from being misused by employees." It's a new framework, he adds.

What's more, Capossela disloses that "web-based services, to integrate with Office 2007 suite, are high on Microsoft's to-do lists". So Microsoft is indeed making a break from its old avataar as a hawker of packages.

The buzz-phrase is Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which are online applications with high interactivity, responsiveness and rich use of graphics to represent information and enable functions.

The server's network data would be accessible straight from Word or Excel, instead of having to use a browser. This will make it easier to work in groups.

The 2007 Office system is currently available in beta-2 version, and has seen over 3 million downloads so far, with over 250 partner solutions having already been demonstrated. This, says Microsoft, spells market acceptance.

In India, Microsoft's biggest Office customers are governments and major corporations. While the existing Office 2003 suites sport clear price tags of Rs 7,000 upwards, officials are still tightlipped about Office 2007's pricing.

In all, 2007 will be a big year for Microsoft. Its new operating system (OS) for PCs, Vista, is due for unveiling, as also an OS for servers, Longhorn. By the time Vista is released, more than five years will have elapsed since Windows XP, its last big upgrade. In software, that's an eternity.