Office 2007 Released to Manufacturing
I'm proud to announce that last Friday, November 3 at approximately 2:30 PM, we signed off on build 4518.1014 as the 2007 Microsoft Office system and released it to manufacturing.
This was followed by a ship party for everyone in Office including a few minutes of speeches, the traditional sounding of the RTM siren, and plenty of champagne (much of which I ended up wearing.) The rain even stopped for a few hours!
You can read the official press release here.
This release has been such a great pleasure to work on. It was more than three years ago when Julie walked into my office (I barely knew her at the time) and asked if I wanted to come over to the user experience team to help figure out if there was something better than menus and toolbars. I had no idea what an adventure I was about to embark on!
Three years later and we've shipped a product that I'm so proud of.
In the near future, we'll be sharing more of the research we've been doing on Beta 2 and B2TR deployments around the world. Just last week, we got back the most recent round of data from ~4000 people in long-term enterprise deployments of Beta 2 in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The results are positive beyond what I would have dared to dream.
To those of you who have been active in the beta program and here on the blog, and to everyone who sent feedback on the betas, thank you. Your feedback truly made the product better than it ever could have been without you.
To the app teams and partner teams around Office and at Microsoft who helped make this release possible, thank you. This couldn't have happened without your ideas and support.
And to those of you on the UEX team, whose ingenuity, consummate engineering, missed weekends, and tireless attention to detail made it all possible—thank you! We did it!
How to get it?
Office 2007 products will be available at retail early in 2007, so you'll be able to get your hands on them soon. Business customers will be able to get Office 2007 through the volume licensing program before the end of the year.
If you're running the Beta 2 Technical Refresh, the good news is that you can keep using that build for quite some time: the client build expires on March 31, 2007, and the server products expire on May 15, 2007.
What's Next?
Between now and retail availability, I'm going to do a series of posts documenting the creation of the Office 2007 user interface from the earliest prototypes all the way to the final product.
Comments
Anonymous
November 06, 2006
GREAT!!! THANK YOU TOO :)Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Office 2007 er gået RTM, nu mangler vi bare Vista og så skal der opgraderes! http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/06/office-2007-released-to-manufacturing.aspAnonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations on RTM. I've been using Office 2007 since Beta 1, and I think the user interface could very well be the greatest upgrade in Office since Office 97. Most everyone I know who's used it, loves the new UI - from home users to technical professionals alike. I look forward to using the RTM build!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congrats! Great work!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congrats! You folks have done some outstanding work. The new user interface is brilliant, and makes Office apps so much easier to use. I've been looking forward to Office 2007 for quite some time. I'll keep using B2TR, but it will be great to get my hands on an official copy. And I can't wait for MS Project to get Ribbonized!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Jensen, Are there any plans to offer RTM eval's for download in the near future?Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations Jensen on making the journey. Your blog has been an excellent read, along with Dave's Excel blog. I hope you will give an update on how Office is received by 'real' end users when it hits the market (rather than beta users) I still think there is an opportunity for fine tuning and polishing the product for Office 2008 and look forward to hearing what will come next during 2007 All the best, SteveAnonymous
November 06, 2006
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November 06, 2006
Congrats on your RTM. :) Can I ask what the siren actually consists of though? And who gets to turn it on? ;) Also, just noticed the blog skin update, nice set of colours. :)Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Well, the day has come! Office 2007 has RTMed (Released to Manafacture). Its a good day! and in...Anonymous
November 06, 2006
It looks quite weird that there is yellow picture in Word's About dialog. Why the picture is not blue as earlier?Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
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November 06, 2006
I've been very impressed with Office 2007, especially, of all applications, Access 2007. The new Ribbon coupled with the new templates, designs, and SharePoint integration might make this the sleeper app of the bunch!
- Dennis DeRobertis www.frontpagebones.com
Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Office UI Guru Jensen Harris lets us know that Office 2007 has indeed gone gold. He says he's proud ofAnonymous
November 06, 2006
What would be interesting to see , assuming you had the builds/screen shots to do it easily would be some sort of slide deck/ slide show with the shots of the default display of Word from the earliest 2007 prototype to the RTM...might be a good way to put things into perspective on how much has changed?Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Terrific news. I can't wait to get the final version--nor to read your upcoming posts!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
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November 06, 2006
Congratulations! Did you do some sleeping in this weekend? Or otherwise catching up on home life? ;)Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Hendrik: There will definitely be trial versions that can be downloaded, but I'm not sure what the timeframe for that is.Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Hi Jensen, great news! Thanks for all the work! Just a few dates: Client expiration is actually March 31, 2007. The trial versions of Office 2007 will go online on December 1 according to the official announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-062007OfficeRTMPR.mspxAnonymous
November 06, 2006
Actually, here's more information, I should have read the press release I linked to more carefully. "Starting Dec. 1 in the U.S. and Canada, and coming soon after to an additional 13 international markets,* Microsoft will make available free, downloadable product trials via Office Online." Thanks for all of the kind words everyone. We have been working extremely hard to get the product done (as evidenced by the slow pace of posts around here in October.)Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Thanks for the update on the expiration date, Patrick. I corrected it in the article.Anonymous
November 06, 2006
I've been amazed at how much faster and better I can work with Office 2007 (Beta 2 TR). More than that, I think you've made the first truly significant step past menus and toolbars--ever. I sincerely hope that the Ribbon, Galleries, Super Tooltips, etc. will become as familiar to us all and be used as widely (by many different companies) as the standard menus and toolbars are today. Your team has not only made the best version of Office, I really think you've advanced user interface design for all software. This is a monumental accomplishment. So thanks! ;)Anonymous
November 06, 2006
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November 06, 2006
I just wanted to add my congratulations to you all for a job well done, and add my thanks for continuing to listen to us all and react to our feedback - even when some of it bordered on being rude!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations - finally you can start work on Office 2010! WilliamAnonymous
November 06, 2006
A totally brilliant set of product; thanks. I know that over the last year, my friend at University have been so jealous of my PowerPoint presentations and the handouts, and essays I’ve written in Word that looked all snazzy! They'll soon be able to benefit too, so if you could, get cracking with V.14 so i can the edge! Thanks. PS: look forward to your posts about the journey to get to Office 12!Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Office 2007 Released to Manufacturing This is pretty cool, I can't wait till I get my hands on a finishedAnonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations on all the hard work to bring us this great Office 2007 release.Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Well done! I absolutely love this whole suite. Thank you for helping to build such a good product (that I will even actually buy!).Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations to all of the Office team! It's an incredible improvement over previous versions, and it was nice to see how all the customer feedback was used to improve the final product.Anonymous
November 06, 2006
On Friday, November 3 at approximately 2:30 PM, the Microsoft Office team signed off on build 4518.1014Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Ci sono! Come già segnalato da numerosi blog, a TechEd sono state annunciate e mostrate le versioni...Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Grats on finally getting it out the door! :DAnonymous
November 06, 2006
Great work! I've been using B2TR for quite a while now and I absolutely love it. Congratulations on a job well done.Anonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations to the Office team on shipping 2007. Well done too for the inclusive nature of this project. cheers SimonAnonymous
November 06, 2006
Congratulations! Job well done! Now I shall impatiently await for it at ELMS (my university's MSDN AA download site).Anonymous
November 06, 2006
As announced here and here, Microsoft has released version 3.0 of the .NET Framework for download. YouAnonymous
November 06, 2006
Thanks for your excellent work and blog, Jensen. I look forward to your articles about progress from early concepts (I hope you will provide many pictures), your posts have always been extremely informative.Anonymous
November 07, 2006
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November 07, 2006
Jensen, Congrats on wrapping up the project! I've been using Office 2007 here at MS since Beta 1 and last night I downloaded RTM onto my machine. It's really great, your team has done a fantastic job. Question: Will Office 2007 support horizontal scrolling via the mouse wheel anytime? I miss the ability I had in Excel 2003 to scroll horizontally. Thanks!Anonymous
November 07, 2006
Kyle: There will be an update to IntelliPoint soon to re-enable this on top of Office 2007. It should be out by retail availability of Vista and Office.Anonymous
November 07, 2006
In case you haven't seen on Chris' blog or on Jensen's blog Office 2007 is done! We had our ship partyAnonymous
November 07, 2006
Fantastic User Interface. Just about everybody who I know working with Office 2007 has already fallen in love with it. Great Job Done Jensen & Team. Do you guys have any plan of ribbonizing Visual Studio IDE.Anonymous
November 08, 2006
Are you going to keep the send-a-smile program running? If we encounter bugs in RTM (which I do in most initial releases) how should we report them? Send-a-smile, at least from my perspective, has been a great idea--MUCH easier, faster, and with screenshots, illustrative than Connect.Anonymous
November 08, 2006
Francis: The Send a Smile program is now closed, as we've finished the product. So bugs or other support issues should be handled through the normal support channels (such as support.microsoft.com.) We're thinking of ways to allow people to continue to provide feedback through lightweight mechanisms, while realizing that as we go from a few million beta users to 450 million users, the quantity of comments would likely rise beyond what we could deal with within the product team. But we're thinking about it, as people have really liked it.Anonymous
November 08, 2006
support.microsoft.com is really hard to handle and it makes people believe you have to pay even for a bug report! Since I'm not in a hurry to roll out Office 2007 immediately I would prefer some kind of Office 2007-dedicated forums (for applications and programming) where you can post your bugs and some persons in direct contact with the product team figure out which of those are bugs and pass those on to product support. I think if Microsoft wants to fix as many bugs as possible in their products they really have to invest in that (i.e. in some additional staff) PS: I posted one bug to this blog yesterday but my post hasn't been released.Anonymous
November 08, 2006
"How to get it?" You forgot to mention MSDN availability... :PAnonymous
November 10, 2006
Microsoft Office 2007 has been released to manufacturing on 6th Nov 2006 and the general availabilityAnonymous
November 14, 2006
Hello Jensen, First, many thanks for this great blog. It kept building up the pressure for making me want to upgrade ASAP! When I try to obtain Office 2007 from MSDN Downloads, however, I see the following: "Note to Customers in France. Office 2007 has not been authorized for supply, import or export to or from France. If you are located in France, Microsoft does not authorize the download of this product, until further notice." Is it a cryptography issue? I thought those had been sorted out a few years ago. Would you have any interesting tidbits about this? Thanks!