Microsoft has announced that pricing for its Office 2003
application suite will be the same as Office XP when the suite is
launched in the US at the end of October.
The software is now being manufactured and will be officially
launched in the US and Canada on 21 October. Office 2003 products
will appear on Microsoft's volume licensing price list on 1
September and shipping in pre-installed PCs will begin by the end
of September.
New licences for Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 and
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 will have a price tag of
$499 (£313) and $399, respectively - the same Microsoft now charges
for Office XP Professional and Standard, but less than it charged
when those products launched in mid-2001.
Upgrade licences will cost $329 for Office Professional 2003 and
$239 for Office Standard 2003, the same prices now charged for
Office XP upgrades. A full Office 2003 price list for the US is
available online at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/pricing/.
Office 2003 is Microsoft's most significant Office revamp in at
least five years, according to one analyst.
"The last several releases were really point releases. With this
release, I think you are getting an awful lot more. I think the
value has finally caught up to the price," said Dana Gardner, a
senior analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston.
Office 2003 fundamentally alters the relationship between
Microsoft's applications and the back-end systems with which they
interact, he said. By exploiting the advantages of XML and
tightening the connections between Office 2003 and server software
such as Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server and the forthcoming
Office Live Communications Server (formerly Greenwich), Office 2003
becomes a front end for an array of business processes.
"In the past, Microsoft applications were really standalone,
isolated products. The files that were created were often scattered
about and hard to manage," he said. "Office 2003 combines the best
of what web services and XML have to offer with the strength of the
client/server paradigm. It has taken an awfully long time to get
there, but I do think developers and independent software suppliers
will look at this as not just an upgrade, but as a dramatic shift
in how Office can be productive."
The new front-end/bank-end integration offered by Office 2003
allows connections to be made among Office applications and with
other corporate systems more easily. For example, companies would
be able to shift data between Office applications such as Excel and
Outlook and their own customer relationship management system.
Documents once disconnected and "off in the ether" can now be
linked together, Gardner said.
Such functionality carries obvious benefits for business users
at large enterprises, but Office 2003 offers fewer advantages for
home and small office users, Gardner said.
"The majority of the product's benefits come on the enterprise
side," he said. "A fresh move to this would require quite an
investment. But for those people who are running Microsoft, this
will be a lot less of a capital-intensive migration."
Microsoft expects most home users to opt for the $149 Student
and Teacher Edition 2003, which includes all the applications in
Office Standard 2003 but at a lower cost. The company has loosened
the licensing terms for the edition to allow more consumers to
qualify.
It has also added Office Small Business Edition 2003 to its
retail line-up, which will carry a $449 price tag and adds several
applications tailored for smaller organisations to the core Office
product bundle.
Office 2003 has been through one of the most extensive beta
testing programs in Microsoft's history, involving 600,000 testers
offering feedback throughout the past year. The suite's official
launch in October will be in New York.
The suite was originally meant to be finalised in June, but the
slipped deadline is more Microsoft's standard practice than an
indication of problems, Gardner said.
Stacy Cowley writes for IDG News Service