ORLANDO — Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes played up the increasing integration between Microsoft's desktop Office suite and the ERP, SCM and CRM applications from its Business Solutions division in his Saturday morning Convergence conference keynote here.

Raikes also showed a slide during his presentation that confirmed a key element of this integration. The slide mentioned a Small Business Edition of Microsoft Office System 2003. The existence of such a version has been rumored, but not confirmed by Microsoft.

Raikes — who heads up the Information Worker business group that develops Microsoft Office — said the Office System 2003 suite will be ready to go to manufacturing in June. In addition to offering a small business edition, Microsoft also will offer an Office Professional Edition 2003 SKU, according to Raikes' slides. Raikes did not elaborate on the products that will comprise either SKU.

After the keynote, however, Raikes added that an SMB version of Office would include Publisher, as it is one of the Office family products most widely used by small businesses. He declined to say more on the SKU.

Microsoft currently offers four retail versions of Office XP for Windows: Standard, Professional, Standard for students and teachers, and Developer. There is no small-business-specific version of Office sold at retail. Microsoft does offer an SMB version, but almost exclusively as an OEM preload..

"One of the things that you will see is how tightly connected we are becoming with Microsoft Business Solutions," Raikes told keynote attendees.

Microsoft distributed to all attendees of Raikes' keynote the Beta 2 release of Office System 2003, which Microsoft began shipping to testers earlier this month. The Office System 2003 family of products includes the basic Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access), plus Project, FrontPage, Visio, Publisher, InfoPath, OneNote and SharePoint Portal Server.

In his keynote, Raikes and other Microsoft executives demonstrated how Microsoft is expecting Office 2003 to improve personal, team and organizational productivity. He showed how Office 2003 will include a number of built-in hooks to Microsoft's Business Solutions applications. For example, the Excel 2003 release includes a feature that allows users to import data from Business Solutions applications like Great Plains and Solomon with no customization required.

Microsoft product manager Michael Risse showed how small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) could make use of the Document Workspaces feature and Windows Sharepoint Services capabilities that will be built into Office 2003. Risse called SharePoint services "the future of file and print." Risse also highlighted the potential benefits to SMBs of the instant-messaging integration that Microsoft is building into both Outlook 2003 and SharePoint services.

No Raikes keynote would be complete without a mention of the Tablet PC. Indeed, Raikes revealed he has been a dedicated Tablet user since June 2002, and that he has four Tablets he is using interchangeably. Raikes said he expects hardware makers to field between 45 and 50 new Tablet models this year.

Tablets allow SMBs to be more connected and integrated with customers, Raikes said. And with Tablets, the "TCO (total cost of ownership) ends up considerably less than standard POS (point-of-sale) devices today," he claimed.

Raikes concluded the keynote by reminiscing about his 21 years at Microsoft. He was employee No. 105, he said, and was the first Microsoft employee to be granted stock options.

About 4,500 people attended Microsoft's conference focusing on its SMB business. The conference kicked off Wednesday and ends today.