Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes played up the increasing integration between Microsoft"s desktop Office suite and the ERP, SCM and CRM applications from its Business Solutions division in his Saturday morning Convergence conference keynote here.
Raikes also showed a slide during his presentation that confirmed a key element of this integration. The slide mentioned a Small Business Edition of Microsoft Office System 2003. The existence of such a version has been rumored, but not confirmed by Microsoft.
Raikes - who heads up the Information Worker business group that develops Microsoft Office - said the Office System 2003 suite will be ready to go to manufacturing in June. In addition to offering a small business edition, Microsoft also will offer an Office Professional Edition 2003 SKU, according to Raikes" slides. Raikes did not elaborate on the products that will comprise either SKU.
Microsoft currently offers four retail versions of Office XP for Windows: Standard, Professional, Standard for students and teachers, and Developer. There is no small-business-specific version of Office XP.
"One of the things that you will see is how tightly connected we are becoming with Microsoft Business Solutions," Raikes told keynote attendees.
Microsoft distributed to all attendees of Raikes" keynote the Beta 2 release of Office System 2003, which Microsoft began shipping to testers earlier this month. The Office System 2003 family of products includes the basic Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access), plus Project, FrontPage, Visio, Publisher, InfoPath, OneNote and SharePoint Portal Server.