MS Office 12's Secrets Begin to Trickle Out

KingFish

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 Aug. 29, 2005. Beta 2 is slated for Dec. 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 vice president in charge of Microsoft's information-worker product management group. "That kind of predictability is very important for our [Software Assurance] annuity customers."

Source: eWeek

Aranyic

I'm looking forward to see if they can find some truely new/good things to do with the a new version of office.

Gobbles

hrmm.. woot updated word processor???? Other than bug fixes how much can you really improve a bloated version of write.exe

t1rhino

Maybe they will go from speech recognition to thought recognition.

/me must remember to turn off thought recognition when cute girls walk by.

Thrax

"So as you can see, productivity is up this year, with marginal profits rising as a corollary to the tune of damn she has a nice ass, I wish she'd come home with me. Could the cut on that skirt get any higher of 6.7% annualized."

mmonnin

Hehe yeah that would be bad.