Microsoft pushes Office 2007 with 'try-before-you-buy'
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Limited use, certain risk WPC Microsoft is shipping limited-use copies of Office 2007 with PCs in a try-before-you-buy scheme to seed the market with its latest suite and drive Windows server and client software sales.â¦
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Some users have gotten the massive Office 2007 SP1 update automatically, even though Microsoft said it would not use Windows' AU (Automatic Updates) to push out the large upgrade for several months, the company confirmed Thursday.Anyone running a preview copy of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was made available to all comers only Wednesday, will receive the Office 2007 upgrade automatically. Users of other in-beta Microsoft products, including Windows XP SP3, which is still in limited testing, will also be hit by the Office update, which weighs in at almost 220MB."As noted to beta customers, if [they] are running Vista SP1 beta software, as part of the beta program, Office 2007 SP1 on pre-release Windows Vista SP1 will automatically install as planned for this beta program," said Bobbie Harder, a senior program manager with the WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) group.Others, including Susan Bradley, a writer for the WindowsSecrets newsletter, noticed the automatic download and install of Office 2007 SP1. "I woke up on Wednesday morning to find a notification that a Vista machine had rebooted after being patched," Bradley said in Thursday's issue of the newsletter. "I found, to my surprise, that the new Service Pack 1 for Office 2007, which was released on Tuesday, had been auto-installed."Bradley also said that even if users of Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, or WSUS 3.0 SP3 manually installed Office 2007 SP1, AU later automatically installs -- actually re-installs -- the service pack.Earlier this week, when Microsoft unveiled the service pack, it said AU would not be used to deliver SP1 for at least three months and maybe as many as six months. In any case, it promised to give users 30 days' notice before it pushed it out using AU.While technically true -- Office 2007 SP1 is only shoved to users running a preview OS -- some Vista users have been confused by the appearance of the service pack in their Windows Update listings this week as they downloaded and applied numerous security patches.Harder explained what Vista users experience in a blog post Thursday. "On Vista in the Windows Update Control Panel Applet, the Office 2007 SP1 will appear as an available update to download and install, but it will not automatically download and install, regardless of the automatic settings," she said.That's true, countered Bradley, but because the service pack shows on the list and is checked by default, it's easy for users to overlook it, then get slammed with the massive download. "If you are a bit asleep and just blindly approve all of the patches, you get a very large wait while SP1 for Office 2007 is downloaded," she said.A Computerworld reader reported exactly that. "I received [Office 2007 SP1] last night Dec 11 as part of Windows Auto-update," said someone identified as 6monthVistaUser in a comment attached to a story about SP1. "Last night was the largest auto-update ever (230 MB download) filled with 11 updates. 1 was for IE v7, 6 were for Vista cumulative patches, 1 was the Office 2007 Service Pack 1, the other one was for Business Contacts Manager SP 1."Harder defended the process. "For customers who want the benefits of Office 2007 SP1 now, we have made it available," she said. She also noted that users could choose not to pull in the service pack. "Download and installation of the Office 2007 SP1 via the Vista Windows Update control panel applet requires explicit user interaction, just as with the Microsoft Update site," she said. "Once the list of available updates appears, they can de-select or uncheck the box next to Office 2007 SP1 and choose to download and install other updates, or just close the applet."The next time Windows Update runs, however, Office 2007 SP1 reappears, again checked by default. To strike it off the list, users must right-click the item in the list and choose "hide update."
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Over its first six months, the latest Windows version can't hold a candle to XP. But: Office 2007 sales rock.
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Microsoft today released the first major update to Office 2007, focusing on collecting existing fixes.
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Microsoft didn&#8217;t include Project in any of its eight official Office 2007 product bundles. But it did add some welcome new features to the project management software, users and analysts said.
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Many admins are waiting for Microsoft to release service pack 1 before upgrading to Office Project 2007.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Thursday it will delay the release of its Office 2007 business  productivity software, citing a desire to implement  improvements from customer feedback received during testing.
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Microsoft is winding down the beta program for Office 2007 as it prepares for a release to manufacturing before the end of the month. On October 25, Microsoft will close its Office Preview site and stop allowing downloads of the beta.
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(InfoWorld) - Many corporate IT managers have voiced concerns that the dramatically different user interface in Microsoft's new Office 2007 software will force them to undertake more carefully planned migrations than they've had to do in the past, with an increased amount of end-user training. But Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the product management group in Microsoft's Business Division, insists that companies won't have to devise "some big sophisticated training plan" to roll out Office 2007. During an interview at Monday night's Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch event in New York, Capossela said IT departments can find plenty of freely available interactive training materials on Microsoft's Web site. Excerpts from the interview follow. CW: Many IT managers say they'll have to do more strategic planning for their Office 2007 rollouts because of extra training time that needs to be built in for users. What would you say to companies that are concerned about that? Capossela: Well, we certainly didn't do this lightly. We've been working on how to do this as well as we could for the past three years. We started by unveiling the new user interface many, many, many months ago to make sure people understood there was a big change coming. And then we did dramatically more end-user testing than we've done on any other piece of software. So I would say to any of the corporations that are considering this: you should know that we've tested this thing incredibly deeply to make sure that your average Office user is going to get up and running very quickly. And the feedback we're getting is that it's far less of a concern than people think it will be initially. There are two data points that we talk about. No. 1 is, for your average Office user, we see that it takes them about two days of working with the product before they say, "I'll never go back." For your power user -- the people who know the ins and outs of Excel, maybe the finance team, or the legal team when it comes to Word -- it takes them more like two weeks before they'll say, "Please don't ever take this away." And that was a little bit counter to what we first thought. We thought the more casual user would be more scared, and instead, it actually turned out to be the more die-hard user, because they know exactly where everything lives in the old version. So it takes them longer. But that's not two weeks of no productivity. That's two weeks before they say, "I'll never give this product up." When they launch the product for the first time, we've designed that very first ribbon so that the vast majority of the common things are right there. There's no hunting around for it. It's literally easy to see: how do I change a font, how do I print a file, how do I open a file, how do I save a file. CW: For those who haven't looked at Office 2007 yet, can you describe the ribbon? Capossela: The ribbon takes the place of menus and toolbars. You used to have menus that dropped down and toolbars that stacked up on top of each other. Now the ribbon is one strip of icons and galleries that you can choose from to author your documents. The vast majority of people -- something like 85 percent of our beta users -- said they were going to be far more productive with [Office] 2007 than [Office] 2003. The other thing we set up to do was to not put the training burden on the shoulders of the IT staff. We really wanted to build the training right into the product and connect that to the Web, where we have really rich training materials. The No. 1 guide I point the IT staff to is something called the interactive guides. There's an interactive guide for Word, for Excel, for PowerPoint. The interactive guide is on the Web, and it lets a user point to their favorite menu item or toolbar item in Word 2003 in a little Web page, and then we play a little video that shows how you do that exact thing in Word 2007. It's essentially a transition tool that you can use. And IT doesn't have to roll anything out. If you hit help within Office, within the product, you get access to that training material. CW: So you don't think IT departments need to build in any training, period? They can just rely on your Web site? Capossela: Absolutely. The best thing for them to do is just take a set of users and do a pilot, where they take a group, a department, and roll out Office 2007. Obviously, do it to a small enough group that IT is going to feel comfortable supporting it and see what kind of support they need for the new user interface. I think people will be very surprised that it's far less jarring than you might think. And again, we credit that to the user feedback that we got in building the product itself. CW: To sum up, then, you think the fears of IT pros about the need for more extensive training are unfounded? Capossela: I think they're rational to be concerned, and planning is a good thing. But all the data we have shows us that it is something that is much, much simpler than you at first think when you hear that the user interface has changed. CW: You said that user feedback has been far more extensive than ever before. By what magnitude? Capossela: Certainly with the focus groups and the usability tests, where we are literally bringing people together and we're watching them and talking to them, etc., I'd say that we've probably done an order of magnitude more than we've ever done before. But the thing that was really the breakthrough this time around was the instrumentation that was built right into the product. When you were using the beta of Office 2007, we were, with your permission, tracking all the things that you were doing with the mouse, all the commands that you were using. And that data was getting sent back to us so that we knew how long people were spending doing certain tasks. That's something we've just never been able to do on this type of scale before. We'd never had 3.5 million people downloading the beta and playing with that. The numbers are just absurd compared to what we've had in the past. We did 600,000 downloads in two days of the beta, and that was more than we had for the entire [Office] 2003 beta cycle. In two days. The vast majority of [beta testers] were sending information back to us, and that's how we got the 1 billion sessions that were tracked. We've just never done anything of that scale before. CW: Do you have any demographic information about the pool of testers? Capossela: It was a mix between consumers, small businesses and corporations. And it was all over the world, because we did the beta in many, many different languages. So it wasn't like it was a financial services thing in New York City. It really was incredibly broad because the download was available for anybody. CW: Did you ask the testers for any information about themselves? Capossela: A little bit of data, but we don't force a lot of profile information. Otherwise, people aren't going to be more likely to play with it. For us, it's not that important to know women between the ages of 24 and 32 beta-tested it. For us, it's just, "Hey, the more beta testers we can get, the more representative that is of the 500 million people that use the product." CW: Are you getting any feedback on the new default file format -- Office Open XML? Capossela: I think it's going to be something that corporations take different approaches on. Some companies, I think, will want the improved security. They'll want the more compact file size. And they'll want to know that they're archiving data in a format that is completely open and that 100 years from now, they won't need a copy of Word to get into one of those files. Then there are corporations that are going to say, "You know what? This is going to take us some time, and we're going to turn the default back to the binary formats because we know those binary formats will work with everybody who has older versions of Office, without them having to download a patch. So, we are going to take a more cautious approach." Some of it depends on what is important for the corporation itself. If they're worried about security attacks against the binary formats, XML is far and away the best way to get secure because that file format was built as a much, much more robust format. It's much harder to break into that format. CW: Isn't it only a question of time before the hackers figure out how to break into it? Capossela: With any piece of software, it's just a matter of time, if somebody wants to dedicate their life to do something like that. But I think it gets a lot harder. It's a little like piracy. Do you do nothing because there will be pirates out there? Or do you do things to really stop the casual pirates, stop the casual hackers [and] make it as hard as you possibly can for people to break into your applications. That's certainly what we're doing. CW: How tough is it to revert back to the binary formats? Capossela: It's a single switch in the Options dialog that says, for my default format, I want to use the binary formats instead of XML. It takes me about two seconds to do it on any machine I walk up to. IT, of course, will do that before they roll Office out. So it's not like you have to go do that to every machine.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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NOVEMBER 05, 2004  - A Microsoft Corp. vice president this week confirmed that the company intends to continue its track record of shipping a new version of its Office System software every two to three years.
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Microsoft has no plans to release a set of tools for Office 2007 that would allow users to access blocked file formats, even though it did so for customers running Office 2003 Service Pack 3.
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By Benjamin J. Romano, The Seattle Times  Jan. 29--NEW YORK -- Microsoft is calling for the world's attention today  as it launches Windows Vista and Office 2007, new versions of the two products  used by millions and responsible for most of the company's profits.
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Microsoft didn't include Project in any of its eight official Office 2007 product bundles. But it did add some welcome new features to the project management software, users and analysts said.
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Microsoft's latest version of Office for Mac adds some nifty interface improvements and a bunch of new features. Should you switch?
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Microsoft's battling Apple's revamped iWork dektop-application suite and its own upcoming Office 2008 (due in 2009) with a deep-discount strategy... and if the statistics are accurate, that strategy is working.
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(InfoWorld) - After five years and numerous delays, customers can now get their hands on the final version of the Windows Vista operating system. Well, business customers can at least. Though Microsoft celebrated theÂ launch of VistaÂ -- as well as Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 -- at events across the globe Thursday, both Vista and Office 2007 won't be generally available through retail in the U.S. until Jan. 30, 2007. Thursday marked the day business customers could purchase those products through Microsoft's volume licensing program. And though business customers can begin ordering Exchange 2007 Thursday, the new version of Microsoft's messaging server software won't be released to manufacturing until the end of December. Not only was Thursday's launch party for all three products a bit premature and anticlimactic after so long a wait for Vista, it could also be the last of its kind, according to industry watchers. With more software being pushed out to customers over the Web as services, launch parties for packaged software products may soon be a thing of the past, they said. "This is a big launch for them but for everyone else it's ho-hum," said James McQuivey, a professor for Boston University's College of Communication who specializes in marketing research and business management. "It's the biggest wait-and-see event of the week. Customers are going to wait and see when they need [Vista] and if they need it." These concerns aside, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer was on hand with his usual enthusiasm at the New York launch event to promote what is arguably the industry'sÂ most highly anticipated product launchÂ of the year. "It's an exciting thing to finally be here," Ballmer said. "That's all I'll say about the past." He had previously promised that Microsoft will never again have another lengthy gap between the major releases of its client operating system. The vendor debuted Windows XP, the previous version of its client OS, in October 2001. "This is the biggest launch in our company's history," Ballmer said. "These are frankly the most significant releases of these two products [Vista and Office] we've ever done." Vista was the big star of Thursday's event, though Microsoft teamed the OS launch with Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 for several reasons. One is that the company is trying to promote the technology links between the products to show how they can bring better worker productivity and cost savings to business customers in the hopes companies will purchase and deploy all three at once. Another reason for the triple product launch is that Vista has been so long coming, Microsoft felt it had to give customers a little extra incentive to be excited about it, said Sunil Misra, vice president of Getronics. The provider of managed services and consulting has been helping business customers prepare for Vista deployment. "It's the love campaign," Misra said, referring to the launch of all three products together. "People have been waiting a long time for Vista." The last time Microsoft released Windows and Office together was with Windows 95. But during that time in the heyday of Windows, customers would have flocked to the new OS release even without its tie to Office. "It's not nearly as exciting as it used to be in the old days," said McQuivey. "With Windows 95 and 98, you actually had people waiting in line at [retail store] Best Buy" to purchase the OS. This certainly isn't the case now, as consumers can't purchase Vista until January. And it may not even be the case then, as consumers in addition to business customers have said they may hold off on purchasing Vista until they need a new PC. Many of those new PCs are bought during the busy holiday shopping season that is currently in progress, but since Vista is not available yet in retail outlets, it can't benefit from that rush. In lieu of that, Microsoft's hardware partners such as Hewlett-Packard and DellÂ are offering discount coupons for the OS if customers buy PCs that are capable of running it this holiday season. On the business side, customers will likely continue their Vista planning process throughout the end of the year and most of 2007, Misra said. Indeed, most analysts think the bulk of Vista business deployments won't happen until 2008. (China Martens in Boston contributed to this story.)