Office 12 Beta in 2-3 Weeks!

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Ever since late last night, the servers at BetaPlace have been frequently crashing and then starting again. Many think that it is because of the rush for Office 12 Downloads, it's actually because of an internal server error.

If you are currently trying to download from BetaPlace, expect your download to be continuously interupted or extremely slow. The average transfer rate right now is about 43KB/sec.

Server Status: Down; Downloads Interupted

Status will be updated when it changes, keep checking here if you are trying to use betaplace.
 
Super! I really hope they automate more functions. I mean, that's what we really need. I can't decide for myself how I want my bullets laid out, office does a much better job! Why would I want them lined up with each other? Ridiculous! Sometimes I think I want to format something a particular way but thank heavens office jumps right in and does it the way it pleases! Bless MS for that. It's so helpful and saves so much frustration when my software thinks it's friggin' smarter than me! Yes, more automation and more bloating. Those things are really lacking. I'm sure this will be a huge step up.
 
As of last night you may have noticed that you could not access Microsoft Betaplace or that downloads were of very low speeds, this was cause by an internal server error and not by a rush for office 12.

At about 2:50 AM GMT Microsoft repaired it's servers and now Betaplace is running perfectly stable with no waiting times, downloads will no longer be interrupted and should be running at normal speeds. If you are enrolled in the Office 12 Beta and have not yet downloaded it, the downloads are now working as well.
 
Well i was able to finish all of my downloads since about 6pm EST yesterday. They were working pretty good for me. I havent finished downloading all products yet but i am getting there.
 
Microsoft in Office 2007 shocker

Microsoft has announced details of its forthcoming Office franchise update. Office 2007 - formerly Office 12 - will be out by the end of this year and will come in several flavours.

All are set to present a clutch of new features, including a new user interface and XML-based file formats. The new Standard and Professional editions will come in at $399 and $499 respectively.

For volume business customers the Professional Plus edition will offer “information management and teamwork solutions”, according to a Microsoft press release. This will principally be delivered through addition of SharePoint Server 2007, and Office's own instant messaging program Communicator.

Enterprise 2007 will further build on this with more for mobile and collaborative business, incorporating Ray Ozzie's Groove software, which Microsoft acquired last year.

Microsoft says Groove will enable group sychronised working - either through its own server, or a $79 per year subsciption service, hosted by the software giant.

The $149 home edition will be called Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, and will no longer be bundled with Outlook. A second beta release will be available in the first half of this year.
 
Microsoft has announced today that what we had previously known as "Office 12" is now officially named "Office 2007".

Also, Microsoft has also released the lineup for this new product:

* Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 (Available through Volume Licensing, no price announced)
* Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 (Available through Volume Licensing, no price announced)
* Microsoft Office Professional 2007 (Retail $499, Upgrade $329)
* Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 (Retail $449, Upgrade $279)
* Microsoft Office Standard 2007 (Retail $399, Upgrade $239)
* Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (Retail $149, no upgrade available)
* Microsoft Office Basic 2007 (Available through OEMs, no price announced)
 
Joe Friend has posted a rather interesting entry on his site, covering Microsoft's Office 12 Blog feature:

Stop, don't jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I'm not an idiot. I'm not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you've ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I'm talking about.

Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don't look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?

Well no more. We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software. That said, I hope that everyone is pleasantly surprised with where we are going with this feature.
 
Another Office 2003 Virus

The zero-day vulnerability that was discovered earlier this week is now used. According to a recent Symantec security bulletin, Trojan.Mdropper.H can affect Word 2003-equipped PCs, but can also crash instances of Word 2002 (Office XP) and Word 2000, without harming the system itself.

Though, according to that same Symantec security bulletin: "Currently, observed attacks are limited to attacks against select targets", "The Trojan begins as a Word document email attachment that includes an embedded executable; when the attachment is opened, a backdoor application is installed and the system is compromised. The backdoor is hidden with a rootkit, and the backdoor opens a communications channel to a malicious Web site, for which it waits for instructions. The Trojan has numerous functions, including taking and transmitting desktop screenshots, by which financial data or passwords might be stolen."

The following operating systems may be affected by the trojan: Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, XP, and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft is apparently working on a fix to this vulnerability, and that it should be available to download through Microsoft Update by June 13, the next scheduled monthly update shipping date. Meanwhile, Symantec recommends to block any Word attachment you can get.

View: Critical Word vulnerability Uncovered
News Source: WindowsITPro
 
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