Thanks to Steven Bink for this news update on Office 12.

Well I saw Office 12 demo's at IT Forum where the apps were named Office 2007, also as mentioned earlier on Bink.nu, the name change of all office apps now have the name Office in them. So "Microsoft Office Word" and not "Microsoft Word"
Now with Office Inline Beta the name Office 2007 appears again, so we can expect to launch as Office 2007.
I also saw Exchange 12 as Exchange 2007, this might change to Exchange 2008 cause it will be released in Q1 2007. On the other hand marketing would like to see the names in sync. Nice detail is that the binaries for Exchange 12 are 8.0 while Exchange 2003 are 6.5. 7.0 had codename Kodiak and was cancelled.

Source: Bink.nu

And check this out: I heard somewhere that Microsoft is planning to make an online version of Office, so people always can access their documents in word, excel, powepoint, and always accessible outlook. So, that would be an awesome move, but it's just a hint that I heard somewhere. We'll see what happens next. Btw. I saw at friend (who got an beta tester status) an new version of microsoft's Hotmail - and all I can say it just beats Gmail by it's look. Anyway, I think microsoft got some stuff to show off, and I can't wait to see what will happen....

Yeah - that's the whole story behind that new Windows Live thingie they're trying to introduce. The idea is you can work on them online from any corner of the world. Got any screenshots of the new Hotmail Beta? Can you please tell your friend to pass on some ?

Never mind - I found some decent screenshots at: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/msn_kahuna_preview.asp

So what's all this hoohaaa about ? I don't see anything great about it. It's got a bunch of new toned graphics and colors and still a WHOLE BUNCH OF ADS sprawled everywhere. Rather than going for the looks, I'd stick to GMail for it's efficiency and speed. Also it vaguely looks like Outlook with the vertical design.

Just looked at the screenshots of the beta, well as I said a lot of where I do not care very much about webmail, I use an email client which I can customize how I want, but yeah, a lot of ads there, but I posted here to ask if the new hotmail will work properly with all the modern/popular web browsers ? or the best will be to use IE ?

Well, I don't think they will leave these large scale ads there, when it goes public. But anyway, I'll stick to Gmail too, becasue of the exact same reasons.. just that, as my profesion is Graphic Design, sometimes an overall visual look drag me away from real functionality...

Getting back to the subject of Office, what's that supposed to mean? is Microsoft going to wait until NEXT YEAR to release the final? I love the new interface and way Office 12 beta works, but if it means i'm gonna have to wait a whole year till they come out with a final version where all the bugs are fixed, i'll switch back to Office 2003. For those of you who haven't tried it, you should. A totally different concept from previous versions. so much more versatile and useful. only problem is that it's not backwards compatible. at least mine isn't, in that you have to save your document in earlier formats if you want it to be able to read on other computers that still use the 2003 version. that may not be a big deal if you're just converting a word file, but if, for example, and i speak from experience here, you've created this great powerpoint presentation with all this fancy wordart, shapes, backgrounds, text styles, and what have you, and it may look great on your computer and save at a mini 5 MB or less, but just try to save that same file in 2003-compatible mode --- forget the 95 mode. Your computer will slow to a crawl as powerpoint searches every text and graphic in each slide, and makes a list of what will be converted to graphics in the powerpoint so that your show will be viewable. that will take a good 5 minutes at least. then the final saved file will be about 10 times larger than your original. come on there has got to be a better way of doing things. --stuff like that is my only gripe.