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After five long years, we are now close to seeing the next release of the world’s best selling application - Microsoft Office. This new version will be called Microsoft Office 2007 (previously code named Office 12). There will be eight (8) different versions of this product containing different mixtures of the following ten (10) Microsoft applications:
All together, Microsoft intends to offer 7 different editions of Office 2007 as follows:
Pricing for these editions of Office 2007 is as follows:
What’s New in Microsoft Office 2007? There are many new changes in Microsoft Office 2007 and listed below are those changes which I feel are most important:
Over the years, the number of tool bars included in Microsoft Office products have grown from just two (2) toolbars in Word 6.0, to six(6) tool bars in Word 95, to eighteen (18) toolbars in Word 98, to thirty-one (31) toolbars in Word 2003. Obviously the complexity has been mounting and navigating these various toolbars has become more time consuming. Based on this, Microsoft has engineered a better way to navigate the Office suite called ribbons. As a practical matter, the ribbons do work similar to the menus, toolbars and icons you are used to, however they are easier once you get used to them and underneath the technology is far better. Presented below is a screen shot of the new ribbon terminology.
File or Application Menu - The only remaining normal menu in Office 2007 is similar to the existing File menu and retains the short title for familiarity. Under that menu there are familiar options, New, Open, Save, Save As, Print etc but the ‘fly out’ menus have changed a lot. They are now enclosed in a rectangle to the right of menu itself. When you first open the File menu this extra space is used by the greatly expanded, Most Recently Used (MRU) file list. Quick Something Toolbar - This is a customizable set of small icons that are intended to let you get fast access to the commands you want. You can add items to this Toolbar by right-clicking and choosing the ‘Add to Quick Launch Toolbar’ option. This feature was, until recently, called the Quick Access Toolbar and is currently showing as QLT (Quick Launch Toolbar). But it seems both names are placeholders for the eventual, undecided name. Tabs - The tabs are the switches to let you see the main interface display. Some tabs always show up and others appear as required. For example a Table tab will appear when you click in a Word table. Ribbon - The big long strip of icons and labels (chunks) is called a ribbon. You can hide the entire ribbon by double-clicking on one of the tabs. Chunks - Parts of the ribbon are currently called, chunks, with each chunk being a logical grouping of icons, labels, menus and other controls. Chunks are not fixed, for they expand depending on their position on the toolbar and the width of the Office window, however they cannot be manually re-sized. When there’s a wide window, a more detailed chunk is displayed with more options. In a narrower display the same chunk can be reduced to a single button – click that button to see a list of the available controls – hence the official name ‘pop-up chunk’. Some other chunks are a single button leading to a dialog. Broadly speaking, chunks on the right are considered less important and will reduce in size before chunks on the left. But if you make a narrow enough window all you will see are pop-up chunks. Each chunk has a title at the top and a little wedge shape across on the top right – click on that wedge to go direct to the full options dialog for that topic. The chunk title cannot be hidden and the arrangement of icons within a chunk cannot be changed. It’s likely that the name ‘chunk’ will change to something like ‘tile’ or ‘pane’. Not everything is changing - Only Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 will have the new user interface. In Outlook 2007 the main shell is menu-based, everything else (mail, contacts, meeting forms, tasks, etc.) will be Ribbon-based. Most notably the email editing window, (which is Word running within Outlook anyway) but the main windows keep the menu/toolbars much as they are in Office 2003. OneNote 2007 is much improved but does not move to the new user interface (UI). Access is getting a major makeover in many ways and the new Ribbon UI is part of that. The ‘2007’ versions of FrontPage, Publisher, Project and InfoPath don not use the new UI either. Officially the new user interface is intended primarily for use in authoring and feature laden programs like Word as opposed to simpler programs such as OneNote. But that doesn’t explain why FrontPage 2007, InfoPath 2007 and especially Publisher 2007 aren’t moving to the new UI.
1. Data Sources - For starters, this new approach enables the creation of documents from differing data sources, thereby accelerating document assembly, data mining, and content reuse. For example, the letterhead used by all company personnel could be linked to a single file. As this file is changed, all documents referring to that letterhead file change as well. Similar methods could be used to link data from a database to documents for faster integration of information. This also translates to easier integration because developers have direct access to specific contents within the file, like charts, comments, and document metadata. 2. Royalty-Free - Further, Office XML Formats are based on industry standard XML and ZIP technologies. They support full integration by any technology provider and are available via a royalty-free license. 3. Smaller - Another advantage is that this approach results in smaller file sizes (up to 75 percent smaller in some cases ) and there are improvements in the recovery of corrupted documents. Office XML Formats use ZIP and compression technologies to store documents offering potential cost savings as it reduces the disk space required to store files and decreases the bandwidth needed to transport files by e-mail, over networks, and across the Web. 4. Safer - Finally these new file formats are safer to work with because embedded code (such as OLE objects or Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications code) is stored in a separate section within the file, so it can be easily identified for special processing. IT Administrators can block the documents that contain unwanted macros or controls, making documents safer for users when they are opened. Also, documents can be shared confidentially because personally identifiable information and business sensitive information—user names, comments, tracked changes, file paths—can be easily identified and removed. The good news is that these new formats are backward compatible with the old formats. Users of Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP, and Office 2003 Editions can open, edit, and save documents in one of the Office XML Formats.
XPS is an electronic paper format built around the same Open Packaging Conventions document structure as the new Office file formats. This means a Zip container and XML content. As such it plays well with other technologies like Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM) and is open to developers to read and write, using the Application Programmer Interface (APIs) in the Windows Presentation Foundation or any other tools capable of working with XML and Zip. This openness makes XPS convenient for a range of scenarios in which it is useful to inspect or modify the contents of the “paper” programmatically. The Windows Digital Documents team is delivering a print driver with Windows Presentation Foundation that will enable all applications that can print to create XPS files. The support for XPS output in Office 2007 goes beyond what is typically passed to a printer, including the supporting information to enable, for example, working hyperlinks, searching, efficient representation of transparency and gradients, accessible documents, and document rights when the source document has restricted IRM rights.
WWF technology brings together document management, records management and Web content management for unified, integrated, scalable enterprise content management (ECM). The goal is to provide every information worker in an organization with a simple way to create, share, manage, archive and find a diverse spectrum of content, and to do that in a way that is extensible for developers. Solutions built using Microsoft Office 2007 will be able to effectively harness the information that flows through companies, regardless of where the content resides or in what format it appears. Independent software vendors (ISVs) will also have the freedom to build specific vertical workflow solutions and surface them to customers directly inside Office 2007. For example, Word documents and Excel reports that are based upon information contained in the companies’ accounting system can be updated automatically as information changes in the accounting system. Imagine if you will that a company produces a 30-page Word document each month summarizing the results of operations. Previously users had to extract and manipulate data the following month from the accounting system and enter that new information in the 30 page Word document effectively replacing the older data. With WWF, the document can keep itself up to date by pulling and manipuilating the accounting data directly from the accounting system.
Exchange administrators in particular could see great benefit in the SharePoint update because SharePoint Portal Services provides a built-in enterprise search engine. For example, one of the things Microsoft supports out of the box is the ability to capture e-mails in Exchange public folders. The folders allow both e-mail and documents to be shared. SharePoint gives users the ability to index and search that content. Moving away from public folders and to use SharePoint sites is exactly what Microsoft intends for it’s users. One of the reasons that SharePoint works so well in a collaborative environment is that it provides the capability for check-in and check-out and maintaining revision control. SharePoint also gives IT administrators a break from doing one-off projects as it allows end-users to create portals themselves. SharePoint is the market leader among collaboration offerings but it does have its flaws. One of the major shortcomings of the product is that there is no capability for doing ad hoc approval writing. It isn't possible to track who contributed what to a document. SharePoint also doesn't allow for inter-enterprise collaboration because it requires Active Directory, a typically internal system. However, Bill Gates told a gathering of executives at the CEO Summit that Microsoft is making steps to resolve those issues in Office 2007 products.
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