Microsoft has released Office 2007 on it's Microsoft Volume License Services website. Confirmed versions available for download are the Office 2007 Enterprise at 559MB and Office 2007 Groove at 189MB. MSDN subscribers can expect to get it on November 12th. Office 2007 went gold on November 6th 2006.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I wouldn't be too sure about that...
I went back to an office I used to work in yesterday and they've upgraded Exchange - they have some nice new tricks in it.
They are 100% MS - It will be the really silly things like the popup notice of a new email with the first few words of the body text when using it with Outlook that will make them stay with it. I'm sure some silly manager will decide it is better to keep it and have that "increased productivity" rather than move over to something more reliable and secure.
Until Exchange replacements can meet every single feature of Exchange (including those silly tricks) AND provide additional features (plugin to decent groupware) AND be more secure and reliable - inertia will keep MS in place.
BTW - one of the "new tricks" I saw was an Alcatel phonebook for their new IP-telephony system which plugs in to Exchange - that is really less of a trick and more of useful plugin that will be impossible to migrate to Linux I would have thought (until Alcatel ports it) 
MS has realised that there are three things which are going to save them from Linux:
1) Software not running on anything but MS or OSX - such as Adobe, MS Office etc. - this is nothing new
2) Plugins - making sure that crucial pieces of enterprise software are dependent on MS software (like Exchange) - this is a newer development and potentially the most disruptive
3) Multimedia - with business sown up with point 2, MS needs to keep consumers reliant on Windows by touting new features such as integrated Media Centre and Games which are constrained to windows for a number of factors (commercial chicken before the egg with Linux, and corporate agreements and royalties)
Although alternatives (whether open or closed source) are technically better in and of themselves, they are naturally constrained by the lack of integration with other "essential" software. As such, I think having people like Oracle getting involved with Linux is a good thing - the GPL stops them from being able to cause too much damage if their intent is not honourable.
Member since:
2005-10-12
Be very surprising. They can do Office to some extent and both make a bit of money and keep competition law at bay. But actually make the Mac version of Office a viable competitor in the corporte environment? No way is the risk/reward ratio favorable on that one.
If Office is ever ported to Linux, which is maybe not too unlikely at some point, you can be sure it will not take Exchange along with it.