A large kitten has escaped the bag, the new SharePoint, I guess out later this year despite the name, will be called...

"Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007"

"Office SharePoint Server 2007 will become the single server that unifies portal and content management, business insight and business process capabilities to enable customers to collaborate more effectively, make more informed decisions and control content across line-of-business applications."

Business Intelligence

Here is more on the BI (Business Intelligence) features of SharePoint. Note the mention of "Create and share server-based spreadsheets." Interesting huh?

Project and Communicator

It will work more closely with Project and Communicator, something I definitely welcome, I think Project overlapped rather than integrated with SharePoint before.

"Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, the new name for a significantly updated release of Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003, will deliver improved information management and teamwork solutions through integration with new Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 capabilities, as well as inclusion of Microsoft Office Communicator."

There is something called Office Project Portfolio Server, that goes with the existing Office Project Server ang gives users a view of the entire life cycle of multiple projects rather than just the ability to execute one project.

Son(s) of FrontPage

There are two products to replace FrontPage, one will be called "Office SharePoint Designer 2007" and will be used for workflow too.

"Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, partially based on Microsoft Office FrontPage® 2003 technologies, is part of the next-generation Web design tools that will help customers create and customize Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and build workflow-enabled applications using SharePoint Technologies."

The second is "Microsoft Expression Web Designer, the next-generation tool for designing dynamic, standard-based Web sites, to deliver a complete set of tools for Web design and development."

More on this here "Q&A: Microsoft Unveils Next Generation of Web Authoring and Design Tools".

The Empire's New Groove

Here is how the various versions of Office will be divided up. I notice Groove 2007 in there, along with Groove Server, Microsoft Office Live Groove and "Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007". Interesting to see Office Live mentioned more too.

Office Forms Server 2007

"Office Forms Server 2007 will provide a scalable, security-enhanced, standards-based solution that centralizes control and management of electronic forms by allowing customers to use a common Web browser to interact with information. It will help streamline organizations’ forms-driven business processes with existing systems." Though it looks like InfoPath will continue to only be bundles with the Enterprise and Professional Plus versions of Office. Oh, there are now seven versions of 2007 Office.

Notice as well, MS is calling it the "2007 Microsoft Office" system instead of Microsoft Office 2007... Don't ask me why!