Archive for the ‘Office’ Category

(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

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

In part 2 of my “Office 14 Revealed” series, I’m going to cover some of the security enhancements being developed for Office 14. With all of the document-based attacks that exist today, enterprises stand to lose quite a bit. Office 14, being dubbed as an “enterprise productivity suite with a layered set of defenses,” is being engineered with these types of attacks in mind.

Layer 1: DEP (Data Execution Prevention) Support – At the first layer, Office 14 adds support for DEP; a hardware-based security feature available in many modern computers that eliminates many classes of attack.

Layer 2: Automatic Document Validation – In Office 14, protection through automatic validation of documents opened in Word, Excel and PowerPoint has been introduced to detect any malicious tampering. When encountering content that could potentially present a security risk, this layer interacts with the user and allows them make decisions based on what they feel is best.

Layer 3: Protected View – Office 14 provides the most protection in the riskiest of scenarios with the introduction of “Protected View” for email attachments and internet files. Protected View allows users to safely view any Word, Excel or PowerPoint file without the fear of malicious binaries infecting their system. Protected View integrates seamlessly with enhanced file-blocking controls which enables administrators to reduce the potential desktop attack surface. The way this is achieved is by eliminating support for legacy document formats while still allowing these files to be safely viewed.

Additional Security Measures:

Trusted Documents: Adding to the Trust Center first introduced in Office 2007, which set out to improve the decision making of end users when presented with Macros, links or other types of content that may impact security, Office 14 introduces the new “Trusted Documents” feature to further enhance the user experience by enabling users to eliminate security prompts for documents they have already trusted. This essentially allows for administrators to maintain strong security practices for unknown documents all without reducing user productivity via redundant prompts.

Cryptographic Agility: Adding to the strong cryptographic support for the new Office file formats introduced in Office 2007, Office 14 extends this by offering native support for Cryptographic Agility by integrating with the CNG (Cryptographic API: Next Generation) interfaces for Windows. What this means is enterprises and government agencies can now use any cryptographic provider they choose to meet national standards or corporate policy. Additionally, IT can now enforce policies in which passwords used on Office documents must conform to domain password complexity rules.

Long story short, security in Office 14 is being designed to keep users in a working mode where they are able to be more productive and secure by default.

Part 3, soon to follow…

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

In my quest to bring you as many unique Office 14 details as I can, I’ve managed to dig up quite a bit of information; so much, as a matter of fact, that I’m going to start a new mini-series of articles here titled, “Office 14 Revealed.” (I bet you didn’t see THAT one coming, did you?) In this mini-series, I’m going to approach individual details I’ve discovered about Office 14 that aren’t currently public. In part 1, we’re going to take a very brief look at how Microsoft plans to approach corporate activation in Office 14.

If you’re up-to-date with how Microsoft has gone about corporate activation with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (and more than likely Windows 7), then you’re familiar with Volume Activation 2.0. If not, then let me introduce you to MAK and KMS:

MAK (Multiple Activation Key): A key with an alloted number of activations which is given to a corporation. If that number of activations runs out, said corporation can contact their Microsoft Activation Center and purchase more. For instance, let’s say your corporation has 100 computers and you don’t want 100 individual licenses to have to install on each computer. With a VLM (Volume License Media) disc from Microsoft, you could either create an image of your install which uses the same key or you could go around and manually install on each computer while still using just one key. When it comes time to activate, computers can either connect individually to Microsoft’s servers or a tool called the VAMT (Volume Activation Management Tool) can be used to activate multiple computers through one connection to Microsoft’s servers or via phone.

KMS (Key Management Service): This is a service you run locally which activates computers in your network without having to connect to Microsoft’s servers, though the machine you specify as the KMS machine will need to be activated via Microsoft. For Vista and Windows Server 2008, there is a minimum number of computers you must have to run a KMS environment.

License Management with Office 14: The implementation of Volume Activation 2.0 in Office 14 is the fruition of the obvious success Microsoft has seen with it. Via KMS usage, organizations will be able to authenticate individual Office 14 licenses on-demand. As implied by the description of MAKs above, organizations will be able to manage “blocks” of keys. These two methods will help allow organizations to keep track of what’s deployed, how many activations are remaining, and protect their volume license keys from theft. Unlike with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, it’s currently unclear as to if Microsoft has a minimum set for the number of machines an organization needs to have to implement a KMS environment but it’s probably safe to assume they will to make it worth it for both an organization and themselves.

As noted by Microsoft regarding Volume Activation 2.0, “In the future, Volume Activation 2.0 technology will also be included in other Microsoft products.” That time is now as Office 14 will see the inclusion of Volume Activation 2.0.

Part 2 soon.

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Grava:

“Grava is a set of tools developed for the needs of those creating educational content. By giving easy access to the power of .NET and WPF and enabling SMEs Grava provides enriched outputs at reduced cost and effort.”

Grava is scheduled to be released in sync with Office 14:

Grava is going to integrate with Office 14 and as the following slide indicates, it’s pulling its design from Office:

Does this mean that the following prototype screen shot is Office 14 with Grava integrated? I noticed that instead of the Office logo in the orb, there’s a ‘G’ to obviously signify Grava, so does this mean we’re looking at a standalone Grava application or a conceptual idea for how the interface of Office might change to signify the user is currently using Grava? If nothing else, we can see the ribbon influence in yet another application and further indication that the ribbon is certainly not going away in Office 14.

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

In my never-ending quest for Office 14 information, I’ve run across yet another roadmap. From November 2008, this one seems to line up Office 14 as being wrapped up in 2009 since there’s no mention of it in “Future”. Curiously, Windows 7 is showing up as “Future” instead of CY2009, so this is either a slightly dated roadmap or perhaps Microsoft just played it safe in this one by not making any guarantees of a 2009 release. Then again, Azure is mentioned and that was only made public 3 months ago, so I don’t see this as being too terribly dated of a roadmap.

Also of note are the references to Windows Mobile 7 and its beta. Apparently, Microsoft isn’t going to guarantee a 2009 release for it, either. Have a look-see:

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Continuing my journey through Office 14 information, here is a screen shot of which products to expect from the business productivity side of the Office 14 wave (aside from the core make-up of the Office suite, i.e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, et al):

Additionally, we know there will be the online version of Office 14′s heavy hitters, so all-in-all, it looks like the Office 14 wave is going to… WASH A LOT ON SHORE! HAHAHAHAHA, MAN, GET IT!? YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE!? MAN, I crack myself up! HAHAHAHAHAHA…. hahaha… ha? …or not.

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Back in October, Microsoft gave a presentation in regards to “the translation tools and technologies used for Microsoft Office localization.” At the end of the presentation, Office 14 was discussed in addition to future thoughts on localization beyond Office 14. Perhaps the right person out there will be interested in the following information. For those of you who don’t understand what this is, it’s essentially Microsoft’s plans for making Office as language-neutral as possible via methods of accurate and efficient translation. Discussed below are some of their tools and ideas for the constant evolution of this process. As written in the presentation:

Office 14 Translation Plans:

Translation Automation Internally:
- Automated word-count forecasting for accurate handoff volumes.
- Scalable process automation around word-counting, recycling analysis and machine translation.
- Integration of Helium, Trados and MSR-MT for post-editing. (UXEvangelist Note: All are internal localization tools but can be read a bit about here)

‘Tools Independence’ Externally:
- Translation vendors have flexibility to choose which recycling, MT and translation tools they want to use.
- Enabled by: standardized word-counts, standard quality expectations, XML-based file format.

O14 Language Technology Initiatives:

Raw-MT Piloting for Office Developer Documentation:
- Translation wiki for SDKs

Translatability Checking:
- Style checker tool integrated with authoring environment
- Reduces effort in editing, catches no-brainer issues
- Improves consistency and quality for translators
- Implements MSTP style-guide: Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications

The Version After Next – Thoughts for the Future:

Tools Independence:
- Move toward standards-based localization, giving translation vendor freedom to choose/innovate tools that works best to deliver on the quality defined by Microsoft.

Extend and Improve the Use of Language Technology:
- Investigate broader use of Machine translation, when appropriate and when the quality is there.
- Adopt advanced recycling solutions.
- Tools support for translation quality assurance.

Customer & Community Engagement

External Academic and Industry Engagement

Again, most of my readers won’t find this information particularly interesting but if you happen to be one who would like to further engage the aforementioned information, feel free to download the document I’m referencing. Likewise, feel free to leave comments and discuss this topic with others who may share your interest!

Reference: TM Europe 2008 Presentation

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

Well, they say perseverence pays off. While “they” seem to be right, I still have yet to figure out exactly who the heck “they” happen to be… *crickets*

Anywho, I managed to get a hold of a very recent presentation regarding Software + Services and amongst the plethora of information is a small-yet-informative section regarding Office 14. In one slide, there are 3 pillars listed as an Office 14 value proposition by “dealing with the paradox of empowerment at the top and control at the bottom.” The 3 pillars with their generic descriptions as they appear in the presentation are as follows:

Ubiquity and Specialization (Role-Based Productivity): Anywhere availability for information and applications. Avoid information overload through personalized workspaces and reporting for each end user.

Consumerization and Governance: The new “thumb generation” comes to work with an expectation to use devices and services uncommon in today’s enterprise class systems. At the same time, the enterprise must also be able to maintain governance by enforcing policies to those new systems and services (today: instant messenging, VoIP and web conferencing; tomorrow: live workspaces, content sharing, peer to peer, web 2.0,…).

Flexibility and Consolidation: Seamless integration with third party back end systems (CRM, ERP, etc.). Need for a cost-efficient platform that doesn’t require allocation of additional resources, consolidation of specialized technologies.

After reading that, bear in mind that Office is primarily an enterprise product. Sure, the usage of Office extends to the realm of home users, students, etc., but the functionality and productivity for those realms has been well-established since Office 2003, though the ribbon bar in Office 2007 has received mixed reviews. Because of this, the breadth of Office 14 is absolutely business-centric. I haven’t seen Office 14 yet, nor have I found any information regarding a UI facelift or what they have planned in terms of user experience but everything I’ve personally run across thus far has pertained specifically to making Office much more productive for enterprises. Not that increased productivity hasn’t always been a goal with Office but my point is that you probably won’t feel much change at all in terms of productivity and performance as a home user, student, or general enthusiast. All of the aforementioned is merely personal opinion, though. Feel free to comment and let me know what YOU think!

Now, without any further adieu, here is a screenshot of the roadmap slide which shows Office 14 in alignment with a 2010 release (click for full-sized image):

Well, I guess that sums it up; Office 14 RTM appears to have officially spilled over into 2010. Personally, I’m in no rush for a new office product, so the fact that they’re a year behind schedule doesn’t affect me at all. As history has shown, I would rather them spend the time on a product to get it right than simply to get it out in the marketplace. Where this jives with my recent post of Office 14 having a final name of Office System 2009, who knows. I guess we’ll see what the cat drags in as we approach Beta 1, which is sure to come in the first half of this year.

-Stephen

(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)

I touched on this in a previous post of mine but I wanted to make it more front and center. Along with it, I wanted to post a picture of the document from which I obtained this little tidbit. There are some other things to try to discern from it but I’m sure the answers will all come in due time. I know it really doesn’t matter to some people if it’s Office System 2009 or Office System 2090 and if you happen to be one of those people, no one cares that you don’t care, so nix the “I don’t care” remarks, mmmkay? lol.

Anyway, here is a screenshot from a July 2008 Microsoft software product roadmap I obtained (click for full-sized image):

I have no idea what those other 4 are that are ambiguously labeled but what intrigued me was the 12/31/2009 “Primary Milestone Date”. More than likely, they’re just placeholders but 2009 being listed as the “Primary Milestone Date” for the row with “Microsoft Office System 2009″ on it leads me to believe that Office 14 RTM could indeed see the light of day in 2009 instead of 2010. We already know Microsoft is a year behind their initial schedule with Office System but maybe it’s all supposed to fit together with the release of Windows 7 and VS 2010; who knows? Anyway, I just wanted to pass this little tidbit along. What are your thoughts?

-Stephen