Microsoft is expected to announce the commencement of the long-awaited Office 12 beta program possibly as soon as next week, according to testers. But for now, it's not clear which Office products — including a new "Office 12 for Windows Mobile" SKU — will be part of the initial test round.

On Thursday, Microsoft sent confirmation notices to the first group of testers accepted into the Office 12 Beta 1 program. In the note, Microsoft informed the chosen technical testers that they should expect to receive the Beta 1 code, documentation and support some time in the next two to three weeks.

The confirmation notes did not specify which members of the Office 12 family will be made available, however. In addition to the Office 12 desktop suite, Microsoft also is refreshing its Exchange Server and SharePoint Portal Server products as part of the "Wave 12" family, the first pieces of which are slated to ship in the latter half of 2006. And company officials have acknowledged there will be other new Office 12 products on deck, including an Excel Server and InfoPath Server.

In addition, partners close to Microsoft, who requested anonymity, said there is another Office 12 deliverable on deck, as well. Tentatively called "Office 12 for Windows Mobile," the product will consist of viewers for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (along with some very limited editing capabilities for Word and Excel) — plus a new "OneNote Mobile" version of Microsoft's OneNote note-taking application. The mobile Office 12 suite is being designed to run on smart phones and PDAs, sources said.

Partners said that Microsoft is planning to include rights-management support for the Mobile Office family members, as well as support for XML as the default file format for the mini-suite. (The XML file format support will likely lag the rest of the mobile Office suite features, sources said).

OneNote Mobile is set to include note taking and viewing capabilities. And because it will be phone-based, it will be able to take advantage of built-in camera phones, allowing users to snap photos of whiteboards, documents or other source information, and then annotate and share that information from a smart phone or PDA, sources said.

It's unclear if Microsoft has other Office-12-related wares for mobile devices in the wings.

"I wonder if Microsoft would ever 'stoop"' to write their own Palm app for opening Office docs," said Mick Thielen, chief information officer with the Timber Bay Youth Investment Foundation in Long Lake, Minn.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on Office 12 for Windows Mobile. He did note that there already are versions of some of the Office point products, such as Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint that run on mobile devices, but said there is not an integrated Office suite at this time for smart phones and PDAs.

Another Microsoft spokesperson said that it is too early for Microsoft to comment on the Office team's final packaging and SKU plans.

"I expect to see more Office editions rather than fewer," said Rob Helm, director of research with Directions on Microsoft. "When you have a mature product, you create variants to grow into smaller and smaller markets. If there can be 12 different kinds of Tide detergent, there could more editions of Office than today.

"I don't expect Office server product licenses to be bundled with Office suite editions," Helm continued. Bundling server licenses with the suite would probably draw attention from antitrust regulators. It's not clear that customers would value the bundled licenses, since only the largest ones would deploy Office servers. The most logical mobile SKUs that come to mind would be licenses for the servers and Office Live service."

Office Live is the code name for a family of services that will complement Microsoft's Office desktop and server products. Microsoft announced on November 1 its intentions to create a set of Office Live add-on services. The first of those services is slated to go to beta in the first quarter of 2006.