Gates gives a glimpse of Office 12

NEWS Microsoft has promised to have the next version of Office ready by the second half of 2006. Details are also emerging about new features planned for the productivity software suite.

The company is still not discussing the specifics on most of the features it will add with Office 12 but is talking about areas it sees as ripe for improvement - including enhanced collaboration, individual productivity, finding business information and managing corporate business documents.

Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes said in an interview: "There are things that are still hard as well as things that have gotten harder."

Some things, such as email, have improved but have also raised new challenges, Raikes said. He noted studies show the average worker gets about 10 times as much email now as in 1997, adding that this figure is projected to increase fivefold in the next four years.

To handle that increase, as well as the rise of instant messaging and other forms of electronic communication, Microsoft is trying to develop software that can do a better job of flagging up really important messages. The concept of setting rules that let designated contacts - such as one's boss or children - reach their intended recipient in a meeting while everyone else gets sent to voicemail has been around for a while but Raikes said that scenario is getting closer to reality.

"The vision will always continue to expand," Raikes said. But, he added, "it's sort of a major leap in that direction".

For Microsoft, the need for a compelling new release is critical. Along with Windows, the Office suite is one of two cash cows for the software maker. The vast majority of the company's profits come from those two products.

Chairman Bill Gates is set to discuss the next version of Office in a speech on Thursday at the company's CEO Summit, which is expected to be attended by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Best Buy's Brad Anderson, as well as many other prominent chief executives.

The new Office edition is slated to come at roughly the same time as Longhorn, the next version of Windows. However, the company has scrapped earlier plans that would have seen the two products tightly coupled together. Office 12 is expected to run on both Longhorn and older versions, with the major changes to Office not dependent on any shifts in Windows.

Microsoft did offer details of a few specific features it plans to add. As part of its attempt to let workers better make sense of ever-growing amounts of data, the company is adding into Excel the ability to create dashboards and scorecards that offer a quick way to visually keep track of just how a business is doing.

Meanwhile, in PowerPoint, Microsoft said it is working to automate more of the graphics features from within the presentation program so workers can create documents that look good without much design effort. The company is also planning to expand its use of XML as a means of sharing data with other programs.

Ina Fried writes for CNET News.com