Update: Office 2003 To Get SMB Edition

Microsoft has been notoriously closed-mouthed about new Office 2003 versions. Until Saturday morning.

The company will, in fact, launch a version of the popular office suite for small and medium businesses with the Office System 2003 debut in June, according to Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Productivity Group.

Mention of the SKU appeared on a slide outlining the Office System 2003 lineup, most of which is due to ship in June. Microsoft has touted some new features in Office as ideal for small businesses, including a new easy-to-use contact manager going into Outlook 2003. But it has refused to comment on packaging or possible SKUs.

Microsoft executives later said there is already a version of Office targeting small and medium businesses, but it is something of a well-kept secret. This bundle of Excel, Outlook, Word, and Publisher is available to systems builders and hardware OEMs and is not mentioned on the Microsoft site listing the other OfficeXP SKUs.

The current retail Office XP offering is available in Standard, Professional and Developer versions, all listed on the Microsoft Web site. There's also a lower-priced Standard edition for students and teachers that has the base Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook applications. The suggested retail price for that version is $179, compared with $479 for the Standard edition for new users. Upgrade pricing for the Standard edition is $239. The Professional edition adds the Access database, while the Developer version encompasses the Professional edition plus FrontPage, SharePoint Team Services and other developer tools.

Any new Office product is of huge interest, given there are an estimated 250 million Office users worldwide. That and the fact that SMB is seen as the growth spot for Microsoft, and virtually every other technology player, makes this extremely important.

Just weeks ago, Microsoft pulled the plug on another family member, internally called OfficeLite. (For more on OfficeLite.)

The official members of the Office System 2003 family (internally known as the iWave) are Office 2003 Professional Edition, Project 2003 , FrontPage 2003, Visio 2003, Office Small Business Edition, Publisher 2003, InfoPath 2003, OneNote 2003, and Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, according to slides Raikes showed at Convergence 2003 here. (More on iWave.)

No other details were disclosed.

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