technical solutions and commentary

Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch commented on Microsoft’s changes to Office 14 in Office 14 to Get the ‘Role’ Treatment, Too, which is based on this article in InfoWorld. Office 14 is going to have SKU’s for Role Based workers.

It looks like Microsoft is moving in the right direction with the ‘role based’ product suites. However, typical with Office Suites are there is one application you really don’t and another Office product you need but can not get in the suite.

A good solution at least with the volume licening options for businesses would allow application substituitions. For example, I may want the Office Suite but not Access, why not let me substitute Visio for Access? Another idea for volume licensing is to have Word & Excel (Outlook is included with Exchange CALS so why not exclude that in the volume license suite anyway) the ‘core’ office suite applications, then let me pick 2-3 other apps to add to form my own suite, such as OneNote, Visio, InfoPath?

I can see where this would make distribution more complicated and may create even more SKU’s. But there are 6 or 7 versions of just Windows Vista being released at my last count which seems just as complicated as far as SKU’s and licensing goes.