Archive for the ‘Office’ Category

Back in September, I posted a story regarding a mention of Office 15 having a tentative release date set for 2013. The comment I referenced made note of a feature that would not be available to SharePoint developers until such a release (WF 4 is the feature). Well, albeit a very minor mention in passing, I just stumbled upon a mention of Office 15 right on Microsoft’s site. It’s from Kolby Hoover, who, ironically, is the Program Manager for Microsoft SharePoint Designer. When asked by Microsoft PressPass, “[w]hat is a typical day like for you,” Kolby responded in part with the following:

Other days I’m wearing my thinking hat, opening my mind and dreaming of the questions and problems that we’ll need to tackle in Office 15.

Comments like that never cease to get my brain churning. I can’t help but wonder what folks like Kolby have on their mind when they say things like that. Office 2010 is shaping up to be a fine product in its own right, but as I said, it’s ironic to note that both Office 15-related comments I’ve come across so far have had some link with SharePoint. Perhaps the O15 release will be somewhat of the holy grail for SharePoint devs? Whatever it ends up being, it has a lot of time to get there.

For the sake of archival purposes (since there’s always a chance they may remove things like this from the site), here is a screen shot of the interview up through the mention of Office 15:

Source: Microsoft PressPass

-Stephen
http://www.msftkitchen.com

Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen

Unfortunately, I don’t have a roadmap screenshot for this one but I’m sure one will make its way down the pike here soon enough. What I do happen to have is what appears to be an insider throwing out a mention of what the next version of Office will be code-named and when it is planned to hit the market.

On Fred Morrison’s popular SharePoint blog, a user with, “insider insight” (aka a Microsoft employee) responded to a post regarding SharePoint 2010 workflow development using WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) 4.0 with the following:

Couple of things on Office 14’s workflow you mentioned above:
- Office 14 (or SharePoint 2010 to use your words) won’t be supporting .NET 4 and WF 4.
- Office 14 still uses workflow foundation 3.5 and .NET 3.5 and you wont get the same benefits compared to when you use only .NET 4 solutions in custom development.
- The workflow platform for WF 4 was indeed rewritten from the ground up and is a much better platform, however, we will have to wait for Office 2013 (or Office 15) before we can use this for SharePoint development.
- WF4 does provide some out of the box sharepoint activities, but these are very different from SharePoint’s workflow and is built by the WF team, rather than the Office 2010 team.

Two things to note are that the comment was posted back in January, so the 2013 mention could be outdated by now, and even though he does indeed seem to be speaking via an informed perspective (aka a Microsoft employee’s perspective), this is merely an observation I’ve made and, ultimately, speculation until confirmed otherwise. I know it seems as though Office 15 was the obvious code name for the next version of Office (seeing it as Windows 8 is following Windows 7 and, “Office 2013″ would put the next version of Office right in line to meet the projected 3-year development cycle Microsoft adheres to), but plenty of people put their foot in their mouth when Microsoft randomly made the decision to choose Office 14 in lieu of Office 13 for superstitious reasons (which I covered in my article, “Why did Microsoft Skip Office 13?“).

As soon as I can dig up one of those roadmaps I’m so fond of running across, I’ll be sure to slap it up here! Let the speculation commence…

-Stephen
http://msftkitchen.com

Well, it looks like Microsoft is finally filtering down information about Office 2010 via some presentations. Take a look at the following screen shots to glean any information you may not already be aware of at this point regarding Office 2010, such as Office Online, milestones through the development phase (including planned Beta and RTM time frames), Office Professional Plus 2010 information, and what the SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as, “Groove”) homepage looks like:

-Stephen

If you haven’t checked up on it in a while, go watch the latest clip on Office 2010: The Movie. It’s fairly cheesy but definitely managed to get a few, “lol’s” out of me. I’m all for a humor-based campaign to sell a product, but hopefully this won’t flop… wherever it’s going. The massive Bing marketing campaign seems to be paying off for the company, so perhaps this, too, will be another step in the right direction for Microsoft’s recent marketing ventures. Anyway, enough chat.

Office 2010: A Virus all Over my Face

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

So, I wrote a 4-part series back in January (I can’t believe it’s been that long ago) titled, “Office 14 Revealed”. I don’t think it reached a very broad scope of readership, so I want to post about it one more time since I still haven’t seen a good bit of this information circulate yet via Microsoft or otherwise. No, I don’t expect you to run and post this stuff on your blog or site, but with the interest of Office 2010 growing and growing, I don’t want this information to just be sitting there in old posts that will never be seen again (my new template should help to alleviate issues like this). Naturally, if you’ve already read this information, CLICK HERE. Otherwise, take a look and please feel free to discuss via the comments!

Part 1: Integration of Volume Activation 2.0
Part 2: Security
Part 3: A More Far-Reaching Fluent UI
Part 4: Improving Desktop TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

If you’d like to help spread the information, I’d be grateful! …or, you can always just CLICK HERE. Mwah ha ha…

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Apologies to all my faithful readers for the extended hiatus. Ol’ Steve-O here has about a gazillion+1 things going on in his life and he thinks it’s really odd to talk about himself in the 3rd person. Anyway… onward to some news-ish-y stuffs! Yaaay!

How’s your French? Mine is pretty freakin’ horrible. Luckily, deductive logic + Babelfish sufficed quite nicely.

On the 15th of April, 2009, a presentation was given in France regarding Exchange 2010 and, “Wave 14.” There are a number of details in this document, including the pillars of Exchange 2010, some statistics and percentages that come along in just about every presentation I get a hold of, and other randomness – but the following details are what I found to be the most appealing, seeing it as this is as-recent-as-7-days-ago confirmation of certain release schedules previously noted internally and brought to us by wzor.net and neowin.net, to name a couple:

April 15: Exchange Server 2010 Beta 1 was released via Microsoft.
July 2009: Office 2010 Beta 1 scheduled for release.
3rd Quarter 2009: SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 Techical Previews scheduled for release.
2nd Half 2009: Exchange Server 2010 RTM
1st Half 2010: Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 RTM

Yay, pictures!

Honestly, I haven’t been keeping up with the most recent news regarding Office 14, but I figured the aforementioned information out of an April 15th, 2009 presentation was – at the very least – worth mentioning; even if only to reinforce what’s already out there!

In other news, UX Evangelist is going through some major changes behind the scenes, including a name change to reflect more accurately the content of this blog (since it’s not just primarily UX-based content any longer). So, I’m still around! Things are just taking a while with everything else I have going on these days. Thanks for your patience, everyone!

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Russian site WZor.Net has posted a handful of nice looking screenshots of the Office 14 Alpha recently given to TAP members. Check ‘em out:

To be honest, some of the UI resembles Longhorn 5048 to me:

What do you think of it? I think it looks interesting. Certainly quite a change already from Office 2007. As for the screenshot with, “Office Mondo Fourteen” in it, “Mondo” was a term used for Office 12 as well. Apparently, it carries over internally regardless of code number (as opposed to code name).

Update: Raiker has translated the text from the site to give a little more information. According to WZor, Office 14 will indeed be called “Microsoft Office System 2009,” and the beta is said to start in may with the final release being planned for the end of the year. Thanks for the translation, Raiker.

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

I ran across another slide from a recent presentation in which the Microsoft presenter clearly states Office 14 will be released in, “late 2009/early 2010.” Man, this has been tiresome! At the very least, this just goes to show that Microsoft is publicly admitting (in some capacity, anyway) that Office 14 could very well slip into 2010. Here’s a screen shot of the official slide:

This slide jives with what Mary Jo Foley has been hearing from Office 14 testers she’s been speaking with: “Testers to whom I’ve been speaking said their Microsoft reps have been telling them Office 14 could still ship by the end of this calendar year, but also might slip into early 2010.”

Oh, and if you missed it, be sure to catch my 4-part mini-series, “Office 14 Revealed” where I discuss some of the new features in the upcoming Office release! You can view them all via this link, which takes you to all of my posts tagged with “Office 14″: Office 14 Posts

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

For the final part in my “Office 14 Revealed” mini-series, I’ve decided to pull some quotes straight from a document in regards to Office 14 improving desktop TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). We’ve already seen that Office 14 will implement Volume Activation 2.0, greatly improve security without hendering productivity, and span the Fluent UI across all Office client applications in addition to SharePoint portals. If nothing else, everything to follow can be considered somewhat of a mission statement of Office 14’s.

“Office 14 is unique in its ability to simultaneously deliver a reduction in desktop TCO, dramatically extended reach for end user productivity, improved security and the power of rich, web and mobile applications from a single IT management platform.”

“Office 14 is a critical layer for organizational security, ensuring users know how to make informed decisions about the documents, emails and other information they receive.”

“On average, enterprises today manage more than 30 individual desktop applications. Many of these applications are interfaces to a business process or to information stored within a business system. Because users are forced to learn a large number of tools, and because IT organizations are challenged to managed user identities across these desktop tools and systems, they fall into a “results gap” where individuals are unable to sort through the various tools they require to accomplish their work. Office 14 provides a better way to solve this challenge.”

“Office 14 is the next wave in business productivity platforms designed to deliver business data and to drive business processes directly from the Office desktop. The new LOBi (Line of Business Infrastructure) stores and manages data connections between Office client applications, SharePoint Server and line-of-business systems to have a single path to and from business applications, streamlining access management, funneling the appropriate information to the right people, and unburdening end users by surfacing that information in tools they already know how to use.”

“Office 14 can be delivered to end users in the traditional manner, as a virtual application, through browser-based applications or even over a mobile phone, all through a single deployment infrastructure. Through integration with Microsoft System Center, and SharePoint Server, provisioning Office across a range of user experiences is easier than ever.”

“Extending the reach of productivity and collaboration with Office does not come at the expense of information security – in fact, managing the many avenues a user has to information is easier than before. In the past, IT organizations were essentially forced to balance the reach of information against its security and access. With Office 14, IT organizations are no longer forced to manage these areas as conflicting opposites. Because the collaboration contexts for Microsoft Office, which include Groove, Outlook, Office Live Workspaces, SharePoint sites and libraries, IT organizations can extend powerful collaboration tools to users in a managed context. Instead of leaving security and access management “in the cloud,” IT organizations can use the collaboration platforms of the Microsoft Office system with confidence.”

“With the Office system, access to information access is managed through a single identity management system. Whether you are sending an email message in Outlook Mobile, completing an InfoPath form, sharing information in a Groove workspace, or uploading documents to a SharePoint site, a users’ identity (and their rights to information and services) are persistent – and consistent – across the collaboration landscape. Even when an organization chooses to deploy Office 14 using Microsoft Application Virtualization, their profile data and user settings travel with them. Managing information Access with Microsoft Office has strong integration points that facilitate interoperability across many systems. In conjunction with SharePoint Server 14, support for new Claims-based authentication allows identity management systems to ensure single-sign-on identity and information access can be managed across-platforms. Advanced IT organizations benefit from powerful customization capability as well. The use of Group Policy Objects (GPO) tailor Office 14 down to the feature level, with fine-grained control over allowable save locations, file formats, application features, macro and add-in execution, and many other areas. Using the Office Security Guide and System Center Configuration manager, applications are targeted to a users’ geography, role or other criteria.”

And with that, I bring this mini-series to a close. Through everything I’ve run across, I’ve learned that Office 14 is a platform keeping security, productivity, and seamless multi-device use in mind. While we’ll certainly see some UI changes, they won’t be drastic. This version of Office is said to be a minor one but sounds like they’re really digging deep under the hood to provide a lot of added value for enterprise customers. If all you do is a bit of document editing and viewing, Office 14 probably won’t add much to your work process or productivity.

Thanks for tuning in and I hope to do something like this again in the near future!

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Part 3 of my “Office 14 Revealed” mini-series is a very short part as all of my research has yet to yield much more than the following.

So, we’re all familiar with the ribbon bar interface (less commonly known by its trademarked name, the Fluent UI) introduced in Office 2007, right? It has been received with mixed reviews but Microsoft presses on. Yes, in addition to updating a number of Windows 7’s applications with the ribbon bar, the Fluent User Interface will be added to all Office client applications, as well as SharePoint intranet sites. According to Microsoft, “this will bring the benefit of the Fluent™ UI across the suite, and organize the application interfaces in a way that makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. For developers and application add-ins, customization of the Fluent™ UI will also be simplified. IT will have greater control in UI customization, including the ability to enable or disable specific functionality or entire applications.”

Conclusion: Any Office client applications which do not currently adorn the Fluent UI will now do as such. Additionally, it sounds like Microsoft may be listening to those who have been begging for more customization and user options with Office 2007’s UI – and more specifically – the ribbon bar. I guess we’ll find out when the time comes. Regardless, this mention of the Fluent UI being spread across Office’s entire client application reach, as well as SharePoint’s intranet sites, jives with Office 14 being a minor release… at least where the UI is concerned. Though perhaps more aesthetically polished and refined for customization, don’t expect earth-shattering changes with the user interfact in this version. I did find vague mentions of Office 15 thinking and changing how forms will be interacted with, but nothing too inspiring or news-worthy yet.

Coming up tomorrow is the 4th and final part in my “Office 14 Revealed” mini-series!

-Stephen