14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has offered official confirmation that Office 14 would ship either in late 2009, or at the beginning of 2010. In this context, Office 14 will hit the shelves in tandem with Windows 7. By the looks of it, Microsoft is gearing up for a repeat of the joint Windows Vista - the Office 2007 System launch with its next iterations of the Windows client and productivity suite. Microsoft's official position has already been to claim that Windows 7 would be dropped three years following the general availability of Windows Vista, which means no later than the end of January 2010. Now, the Redmond giant is indicating that the Office 14 and Windows 7 versions of the company's flagship products will be joined at the hip just as Vista and Office 2007.
In a roadmap information document offered exclusively to partners and customers, the Dynamics CRM team revealed that the successor of Office 2007 would be synchronized with Dynamics CRM 'V.Next'. "This document outlines the future direction of Microsoft Dynamics CRM through to the next major release, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 'V.Next', which will be aligned with the Office 14 wave of product releases due in late 2009/early 2010," reads an excerpt of the resource, cited by Ben Riga, a Platform Evangelist in the Developer and Platform Evangelism group.
In the past, Office 14 was referred to as Office 2009, and its launch was said to take place by the end of next year. At the Financial Analyst Meeting 2008 the past week, Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group, re-confirmed Windows 7's planned availability in late 2009/early 2010. At the same event, Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division, was quite reluctant to pinpoint the availability of Office 14.
"As it relates to the timing of Office 14, all we're saying at this point is that we'll continue to follow the same general wavelength of releases that you've seen with previous cycles of Office," Elop stated, although he admitted that Microsoft had already demoed the successor of Office 2007.
"You can imagine how it felt for me, standing up at the worldwide sales meeting, and showing, for the very first time in any sort of audience, the very first signs of what Office 14 would look like. So we did that just last week. The sales people saw part of Office 14 for the very first time. And I'll tell you, the response -- 13,000, 14,000 people on their feet cheering with everything that we're putting forward. It's just amazing. So there's still so much more ahead," Elop stated adding that Microsoft had sold in excess of 120 million licenses of the Office 2007 System, in conjunction to the 180 million copies of Windows Vista.