LOS ANGELES — While declining to talk packaging specifics, Microsoft executives offered more hints on its Office 12 server plans here at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week.

During his Wednesday PDC keynote address, Microsoft Senior Vice President of Office Steven Sinofsky didn't reveal specifics on Microsoft's plans to add new servers to the Office 12 family of products, which are due to be shipped in the second half of 2006. Instead, Sinofsky and other Microsoft Office team executives indirectly addressed the company's Office Server plans.

Microsoft partner sources have said they expected Microsoft to field new Excel Server 12 and InfoPath Server 12 products, among other potential server offerings. And at the PDC this week, Microsoft officials are demonstrating new Office 12 scenarios, such as "Excel Services" storing and retrieving spreadsheets running on a server. Microsoft officials are demonstrating a similar scenario on the InfoPath front. Office 12 Users will be able to access and store electronic forms via a SharePoint server on the back end and view them from inside an application or even a Web browser.

During his keynote demonstration on Wednesday, Sinofsky told show attendees that, in terms of the company's Office 12 server investments, "Windows SharePoint Services is the core platform element we build on."

SharePoint Services is Microsoft's Web collaboration technology that is a component of Windows.

With Office 12 servers, Microsoft is aiming squarely at the enterprise-content management (ECM), or document-lifecycle, space, said Microsoft officials. To deliver an end-to-end ECM solution, Microsoft will make sure Office on the desktop is even more tightly integrated with current and future Office servers. Among the desktop elements Microsoft is more tightly tying to the servers are Forms services and Excel services, Sinofsky specified during his Wednesday talk.

Sinofsky and other Microsoft executives at the PDC showed a slide during their presentations that outlined a set of investment areas for the Office team around SharePoint Services. The slide mentioned what appeared to be a family of Office Servers. On the list: Collaboration, portal, search, content management, business process (forms and workflow) and business intelligence (spreadsheets and other analysis-oriented elements).

When asked later if these six servers should be considered as the list of new Office 12 Server SKUs, Microsoft officials said no.

"We are making a big bet on SharePoint and all our servers going forward will be packaged with it," said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft's general manager of Information Worker product management. "However, we have not said how they ultimately will be packaged."

Koenigsbauer confirmed that Microsoft will release a new version of SharePoint Services simultaneously with Office 12. Some are calling this SharePoint Services Version 3.

Among the new features coming in that release, according to Koenigsbauer, are a new user interface that will feature the "chrome" elements on top instead of the side; a single architecture that will be common across all products; item-level security, allowing users to set permissions on individual items; integration with the recently announced Windows Workflow Foundation technology; and a new business-data catalog, part of SharePoint Services' search functionality, that will allow developers to create new connections to back-end systems and objects.

Sinofsky told show attendees that Office 12 is still a couple of months away from reaching Beta 1. He did not specify if any of the expected Office 12 servers will go Beta 1 simultaneously with the desktop suite.