The next version of Microsoft Office, expected in January, represents a dramatic break with the past, at least by Office standards. The core applications have a whole new user interface and use a new file format, the first since 1997. Office 2007 also presents something of a new strategy, as Microsoft attempts to see off several major competitors — most important being Microsoft Office 2003, Office XP and Office 2000, with a few laggards still using the decade-old Office 1997.
Microsoft’s main problem is that Office already has more than 400-million users, and the general opinion seems to be that it is ”good enough”. Getting users to pay for something better is a challenge, as Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft senior vice-president in charge of Office, admits. ”No-one ever thinks something else is done — printers, automobiles, televisions,” he grumbled. And Office isn’t finished either. ”Productivity software is still in its infancy. There’s still lots of things for us to do.”
Though I would like to, I must not tell you what they are. Sinofsky was speaking at one of this month’s two-day Office reviewers’ workshops, held — by invitation only and at Microsoft’s expense — at the Marriott Hotel by Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Most of the crowd was American, but there was a handful from the United Kingdom plus other assorted Europeans from as far away as Poland. The main attraction is that you get the word directly from the decision makers — product managers and program managers such as Jensen Harris, Gray Knowlton and Brian Jones. The drawback is that you agree not to talk about stuff before it is released.
Still, there were some very clear trends, one of which was summed up by one of our contributors, Simon Bisson, in a rare 15-minute break. ”There’s a lot of emphasis on heavy lifting,” he said. Indeed there was. If you think of Office as a small collection of personal productivity tools — mainly Word, Excel and PowerPoint — then you’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. Office 2007 is being positioned as the front end to most of a company’s business application needs, including content management, project management, business intelligence, all types of forms processing and workflow, all types of communication (including email, instant messaging and SMS), and collaborative working, including shared workspaces, blogs and wikis.
And the central application is often one that few people have heard of — SharePoint Server 2007 — but millions will use without knowing it. Amusingly, the web-based service now being beta tested as Office Live is not an online version of Office, and you do not even need a version of Office installed on your PC; it is, in fact, SharePoint.
To take a random example, as a project manager, you will probably see Microsoft Project on your PC. But behind that — if your company buys into the Microsoft strategy — is Microsoft Project Server, Microsoft Portfolio Manager, SharePoint, SQL Server and Windows Server software. You will also have Word, Excel and Power- Point, of course, plus Outlook, Office Communicator, Groove and InfoPath. (All of these are part of the Enterprise edition of Office, along with Office Publisher and OneNote.) Your IT department will probably need Visio and Visual Studio, too.
The long-term strategy behind Office System 2007 is to empower people to drive the enterprise from their desktops — not that you could figure this out from Microsoft’s ”people-ready” US marketing campaign. It is of less interest if you do not have an enterprise. The new ease of use is also a major attraction, of course. But I would not bet on 400 million people being willing to pay for it. – Guardian Unlimited Â