It was all about Office 12 or as some call it 2007 and Vista. As from the 16 October 2006 to the 15 March 2007 they have a procedure in place to replace copies of 2003 Office with the equivalent in 2007 which in the US & AU is called [b]Office Technology Key[/b] but as of the moment there is no listing of this on M$ US Web Site and there is a postage & Handling payment involved. Currently that amount is debatable so I'll not even pass on any of the 3 different figures mentioned tonight.
If you are only looking at Office 2007 SA probably isn't a good idea as it locks you into a 3 year contract with MS that by the looks of things will offer you little to no benefit.
These are the words of every presenter tonight not mine as I personally don't believe them for a minute but according to M$ they are capturing the [b]Glory Days[/b] again and the release of Vista and Office 2007 will be greater then the release of Windows 95. You can expect to see a massive advertising blitz over the new M$ Products and I would imagine lots of nice Mag Publications on just how much better Vista & Office are over the previous offerings.
Now for the punch line as OEM System Builders we are expected to load a copy of Office onto every computer and it will depending on a product Key that the end user buys activate the different versions of Office or leave it as a 60 Day Trial Period where the customer can buy a License but they need to order any recovery Media so we will effectively be selling OEM Product without recovery media something that has been a big no no since the 98 days. We can hand then a pretty License with the Product Key on it but that's all. When I looked at one of these Certificates I realised that I could program an Image Runner Photocopier to produce them and fold them exactly he same way so there is no high security in place there though every copy of Office will have it's own version of WGA attached to it and it's mandatory to use just like WGA is for XP. By March this will be locked in and you will be unable to get any updates or Templates unless your software passes the testing procedure.
Currently M$ is claiming that 30% of all their Software is currently Pirated so they are locking down on this and making it harder to pirate. I don't know about you but if my previous experiences are anything to go by that means that it's going to be much harder to prove that you have got what you say you have and the Reg Edits required to change Product Keys are likely to do far more damage than just reloading the computer from scratch though they do have an unproved Rescue Console which may make things better though as they only had the RC1 version available here they couldn't show us any of these new beaut things.
Col
