Later this month, Microsoft will make the 2007 Microsoft Office system broadly available to volume license customers. This new version of the world-leading productivity software solution includes popular application suites such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook. The new release marks the most significant advancements to Microsoft Office in over a decade and includes a newly redesigned user interface intended to help customers get more out of their desktop applications. The new UI represents a massive R&D investment and is a big step forward in terms of simplicity, ease of use and end-user productivity. By licensing this intellectual property, Microsoft seeks to allow partners to take advantage of its large R&D investment in order to benefit users.

To that end, Microsoft has created a royalty-free licensing program that will enable developers to build applications that have the look and feel of the new 2007 Office system applications. The new program will license elements of the new UI to software developers and component vendors on a royalty-free basis.

PressPass spoke with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft general manager, Office Client, to discuss the user interface redesign and explain the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface licensing agreement.

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