OneNote 12 is now OneNote 2007, and it's in the box!

Naming baby!
Today our branding folks finally unveiled the naming for Office 12 (which includes OneNote 12). We will be known as Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2007, although you won’t find me using that 10 gallon moniker. It'll be OneNote 2007 from here on out.

Not surprisingly, Office is also "2007", and its official name is 2007 Microsoft® Office System. That term describes all the Office products of course, both servers (such as SharePoint) and clients.

Hey we're in the big leagues!
The other big news for OneNote is that it is now included in some versions of Microsoft Office SKUs. (Stock Keeping Units a.k.a. "packages"). We've proven our worth and graduated from AAA status!

If you go to the store to buy Office, you'll find a few different versions, but the most common will probably be Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. This has a suggested US retail price of $149. This suite includes:

  • Word
  • Excel
  • PowerPoint
  • OneNote (woohoo! )

There will also be Standard, Professional and Small Business versions of Office available at retail, but these do not include OneNote. OneNote is part of the student-oriented "SKU" because it is seen as especially appropriate for students and we were looking for a bundle of software that matched students' needs but didn't have too high a price.

As you may know, retail sales represent only a small percentage of sales opportunity for Office and OneNote (which is one reason we don’t really advertise). Most of Office is sold to corporations directly. There's the well-known Standard version of Office with the four core applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) and there's the version most organizations use called Professional Plus 2007 (formerly known as Professional Enterprise Edition).

Professional Plus is a little different from the Professional version you see in stores. In addition to the core applications, Professional Plus has applications like Access, InfoPath, Publisher, and new for 2007: Communicator (our Instant Messenger for businesses). It also includes some special functionality integrated into the main applications to help with Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Essentially you can now have very organized workflow-based "content creation", meaning that you can start a document and the system can already know who sees it next for review, who approves it, etc.

Still More OneNote!
The exciting news for the OneNote team is that there is now a new "SKU" for businesses called Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 which includes everything in the Professional Plus SKU but also includes Groove and OneNote. This über version of Office is especially targeted at firms or groups within a firm that need to be mobile and collaborate a lot. For example consultants working a lot at remote sites or the mobile sales force.

OneNote makes sense here of course not just because it is great for note taking and capturing information in a mobile environment but also because of the Shared Notebooks feature. If you are out of the office a lot, you need a collaboration system that doesn’t require you to have internet access in order to work. OneNote provides that via shared notebooks which are like super-rich wikis that you can use offline and then have changes you and others made sync up when you later get a net connection. Groove of course is a nice complement as it provides a workspace for shared documents, forms, etc that can also be used offline. You can read more about Groove at Marc Olson's blog.

OneNote à la carte
And of course OneNote is still available as a standalone purchase. We're still offering OneNote for the introductory pricing of $99 ($49 for academic users). Get 'em while they're hot! I recommend the béarnaise sauce be kept strictly on the side though.

Some people have asked me if there will be a further discount on that $99 price for upgrade users who already have 2003. The answer is "that is the upgrade price". If you compare with Word 2007 standalone which retails for $299 and has an upgrade price of $109, you can see what I mean. Another comparison is Publisher 2007, which retails for $169 and has an upgrade of $99. Essentially the deal is built-in for OneNote. Come to think of it, we're all upgrading from paper...