The revelations about the next version of Office come hard upon reports last week that the next version of Windows, alternately called Windows 7 or "Vienna," will also see release in 2009. Microsoft has since tried to publicly retract that statement.

The Microsoft slides show the first beta of Office 14 due in the first half of 2008, a second beta due in the second half of 2008, and a final release in the first part of 2009, or between 26 and 32 months after Office 2007's release.

The slides also indicate that in Office 14, Microsoft plans to continue building on the established core features of the 25-year-old Office suite, and will focus on three areas: enterprise content management, communication and collaboration, and business process and business intelligence.

In particular, according to AeroXperience, Microsoft hopes to improve search relevance, enhance the management of complex documents and content, bring business intelligence into the business process itself, improve the offline experience in products such as SharePoint, and simplify the building of business applications on the Office platform through declarative programming and improved business data catalogue integration.