It's important to be clear that the OfficeWriter software remains available now and will continue to be enhanced, upgraded and available in the future. Customers who need OfficeWriter functionality can purchase the product exclusively from SoftArtisans today, knowing that this functionality will be available as part of a Microsoft product at some point in the future. It's a winning situation for all parties.

Microsoft acquired all the intellectual property of OfficeWriter. As part of the arrangement, several members of the SoftArtisans development team have already moved to Redmond to join the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) team.

Microsoft then licensed the OfficeWriter software back to SoftArtisans so that we can continue to evolve, maintain and support OfficeWriter. This arrangement means that this important functionality continues to be available today while Microsoft integrates it into future versions of SQL Server and potentially other Microsoft products.

Since this is a process that will take years, it is to everyone's benefit that SoftArtisans continue to sell, evolve, upgrade and maintain OfficeWriter during this prolonged integration period. The two development teams will work in lock step to ensure that issues, new features and future customer requirements are shared. SoftArtisans has already been providing the SSRS team with feature and functionality requests. There are also financial incentives for both companies to make this arrangement work.

Katmai will contain some OfficeWriter functionality. At a very minimum, it will include reporting in Microsoft Word format. Other parts of OfficeWriter will appear in future releases from Microsoft. The last piece to be integrated will likely be Enterprise Edition functionality including run-time APIs for manipulating Excel and Word documents. SSRS has no run-time capability at the present time, which is why this piece is farthest away. At some point, years from now, the integration will be complete and SoftArtisans will no longer sell OfficeWriter as a separate product.

SoftArtisans has other product lines and is actively developing exciting new software that addresses the needs of our enterprise customers. We look forward to maintaining a positive and mutually beneficial relationship with our customers now and for the foreseeable future.