Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise for Lifetime

Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise for Lifetime (codenamed Office 12) is a version of Microsoft Office, a family of office suites and productivity software for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007,^[1] the same respective release dates of Windows Vista. It was preceded by Office 2003 and succeeded by Office 2010.

Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars.^[9] Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. The new formats are intended to facilitate the sharing of information between programs, improve security, reduce the size of documents, and enable new recovery scenarios.^[10]

Office 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, or a later version of Windows; it is the last version of Microsoft Office to run on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, as well as the x64 editions of Windows Server 2003.^[3]

Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is Office SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports Excel Services, a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.

With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.

Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite, as Windows Speech Recognition was integrated into Windows Vista. Windows XP users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.^[11]

According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed (its sample comprising 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers).^[12]

Mainstream support for Office 2007 ended on October 9, 2012, and extended support ended on October 10, 2017.

Development

The first beta of Microsoft Office 2007, referred to as Beta-1 in emails sent to a small number of testers, was released on November 16, 2005. The Beta-1 Technical Refresh was released to testers on March 13, 2006. The Technical Refresh fixed issues in installing with Windows Vista build 5308.

Microsoft revealed the ribbon on March 9, 2006 at CeBIT in Germany.^[14]

Office 2007 Beta 2 was announced by Bill Gates at WinHEC 2006, and was initially released to the public at no cost from Microsoft’s web site. However, because of an unprecedented number of downloads, a fee of $1.50 was introduced for each product downloaded after August 2, 2006. The beta was updated on September 14, 2006 in Beta 2 Technical Refresh (Beta2TR). It included an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality.

The beta versions continued to function in a reduced functionality mode after February 1, 2007. If users downloaded the Technical Refresh to update Beta 2, then users could use its full functionality until March 31, 2007 for client products and May 15, 2007 for server products. The Beta program ended on November 8, 2006, when Microsoft declared the product “Released to Manufacturing” (RTM) and started manufacturing the final product. After RTM, the availability of the beta download ended.

Office 2007 was released to volume licensing customers on November 30, 2006, and to the general public on January 30, 2007.^[1] Mainstream support ended on October 9, 2012.^[15] Extended support ended on October 10, 2017.^[15]

Service packs

Since the initial release of Microsoft Office 2007, three service packs containing updates as well as additional features have been released. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Packs are cumulative, so previous Service Packs are not a prerequisite for installation.^[16]

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 was released on December 11, 2007.^[17] Official documentation claims that SP1 is not simply a rollup of publicly released patches, but that it also contains fixes for a total of 481 issues throughout the entire Office suite.^[18] Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 was released on April 28, 2009.^[19] It added improved support for ODF, XPS and PDF standards, and included several bug fixes.^[19][20] Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 was released on October 25, 2011.