NEWS
Microsoft is working hard to ensure Office 14 integrates well with other products. The next version of Office will natively support the OpenDocument format (as will the next service pack for Office 2007). As it is developing the next Office, Microsoft is also documenting every change it is making as part of its commitment to documenting all of Office's various formats and protocols.
Antoine Leblond, who leads the Office engineering effort, said: "We often talk about the changing needs of the customers and our industry. The one thing we don't talk about is how those needs have changed our engineering process."
Adding support for more standards and file formats may not be the biggest headline-grabber but it is important to customers, Leblond said.
"This certainly is as important as any feature we would go do," he said.
Although Leblond said it was a lot of work to go back and document 25 years of the Word file format, he said the fact his engineers now have to write down what they are doing can pay off in a number of areas, including security.
"Frankly, it's just good engineering," he said. "It actually has a lot of benefits."
Microsoft isn't just trying to work with its rivals, though. Much of the effort in Office 14, as with the past couple of releases is to also make Office work better with business processes. Some of that is efforts like Duet, which links to SAP, but it is also about helping businesses automatically generate and integrate Office documents as opposed to having Office documents live in their own world.
"What people are doing tends to be stand-alone," Leblond said. "What we hear people asking for all the time is [ways of] extending these into corporate processes."
It will take some time for the fruits of this work to come to market. Microsoft has already said not to expect Office 14 this year. Microsoft hasn't given a lot of detail on when it will come, although, in an interview this week, Chris Capossela said Microsoft is hoping not to be too far outside the company's traditional three-year time frame between releases.
In addition to the standards work, Microsoft's big focus with Office 14 has been about adding the Office Web Applications that will let Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote run in a browser. With Office 14, Microsoft will also have updated versions of the Office apps for Windows Mobile.
The browser-based web apps will also help take Office onto the iPhone. Over time, Leblond says Microsoft needs to work on even more types of phones. "We want every manner of cell phones to read Office documents," Leblond said. "That's an important thing. We don't live in this bubble."
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1. Daz Hughes
Lets hope Office 14 is more ready for business than Office 2007. Whilst many people applaud Outlook, Word 2007 is a disaster zone.
Most of our clients are insisting on keeping Office 2003 for productivity reasons, putting Word 2007 on a machine (especially an experienced PA/Secretary) grinds them to a halt.
The defaults out-of-the-box are most suited to students, not professionals. Experienced users (even after training) keep having trouble finding functions within the application and the application needs comprehensive customisation and option tweaking before it behaves like a word-processor.
Whilst we applaud things like XML document formats and integrated PDF generation, if the product is so cumbersome that staff want to throw it out of the window these new features will never be explored, which is a shame.