[petek]

Generally speaking, Inventor files cannot be transfered backwards between different releases of the program. This has been the case as far back as I've used Inventor (v5.0). From a later release you can always open a file created with an earlier release, but not vice-versa.

I can't say for certain that v8 is what will be shipped, but that is the most likely candidate. Autodesk released v9 last summer and for the last few years they've shipped FIRST that year's previous release (8 in this case).

If you have v7 and don't want to wait for v8 to get started, I'd say just do it - you can always use your v7 work in v8.