Steven Sinofsky (Senior Vice President, Microsoft Office) has announced that Microsoft is planning to build in native support for the PDF format in Office "12".
The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath. There is no word on whether customers will be able to use support in Outlook. The new functionality will work in combination with the new Open XML formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft wants to ensure that sharing documents across multiple platforms and long term archiving are easily available. Customers now have several options, with the existing support for HTML and RTF, and now the new support for Open XML formats and PDF.
Brian Jones (Program Manager, Microsoft Office) commented on his blog that "this really all comes down to the basic theme of content sharing. We realize that this is a really important scenario, and that"s why we"re making the move to default XML formats that are fully documented. Now we"ve moved to the files being in open, redistributable, and archivable formats; and we can focus more of our innovations around ways to act on those formats. This is true on the client and the server."
Office 12 is currently undergoing internal testing and is expected to be released in beta form in November.