Office 12 Target: July 2006
Microsoft still isn't ready to talk publicly about Office 12, its next major release of its information-worker family of products. But the company is briefing selected partners and customers about the forthcoming family of Office desktop and server products.
According to partner sources who requested anonymity, Microsoft has established an internal Office 12 ship calendar that pegs Office Beta 1 availability for August 29, 2005. Beta 2 is slated for December 5, 2005. The internal release-to-manufacturing target is May 22, 2006. And the target for "street" availability for the Office 12 System is July 17, 2006, the sources said.
Microsoft officials declined to confirm these dates.
"We will continue the trend of shipping a new version of Office every two to three years," said Chris Capossela, the corporate VP in charge of Microsoft's information worker product management group. "That kind of predictability is very important for our (Software Assurance) annuity customers."
Microsoft released its Office System 2003 family of products in October 2003.
Microsoft officials decided earlier this year to develop Office 12 independently of Longhorn client and Longhorn Server, Microsoft's next Windows releases, due out in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Capossela said that Microsoft currently expects Office 12 products to run on Windows XP and Windows 2000 on the desktop, and Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 on the server. He said Microsoft is not yet sure which service packs it will require on these older releases in order to run Office 12.
