Living With Office 2007: Prologue

As I said in my column, after doing my little feature on living only in Web 2.0 productivity applications for a whole week, I just had to do one of living in Office 2007 beta (techie refresh). Besides, I happened to have a Dell Precision M90 super-notebook all decked out with dual core CPU hardware, 2 giggers of RAM and a CAD-capable 3D-accelerating hard disk with a couple of hundred megs of video RAM all to itself. In other words, and Aero paradise. So I figured, “Go whole hog. Office 2007 on Vista RC2 with all the bells and whistles.”

It’s actually been two weeks now and I may not stop using it all, which is most likely going to tick of Dell PR since I’m running it on their PC. Hey, a bunch of steak-eating Texan dudes coming up here to get what they want. What could possibly happen?

My experiences with Vista are in this week’s and last week’s column–tho I may flesh it out a bit more here in the next few days. I’ll also have a shorter technical summary of Office 2007 on Tech Center Daily later this week. In the next few posts, I’ll cover the most popular Office applications. Microsoft still owes me Project 2007 and Visio 2007.

So let’s get to it. First thing’s first: The ribbon. It’s big, it’s weird looking, why is it there? Basically, it’s there to turn the traditional menu bar (File > Edit > View > etc.) into something graphic, intuitive and easy. When I asked Microsoft Office UI design team, they said that when they queried customers on what they thought of Office 2003, the complaint that came back most often was a difficulty in finding both new and old features in the ever-changing nested menu system.

The ribbon does away with that because every feature that an application can manage is organized and represented there graphically. Even when Office changes again and more features are added, users will still have an easier time finding old features because they’ll be able to scan for its icon rather than hunt and click for its menu position.

However, only certain applications are getting the ribbon this time around. So far it’s the most popular: Access, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. OneNote, Outlook and Publisher have new features but retain the old menu system for now–and I haven’t seen Project and Visio as yet. More on all those in Part II. Oh, and the official word is no changes to this setup in 2007’s product lifecycle. If more apps are to get the ribbon, we’ll have to wait until Office 200x? to see.

The ribbon summarizes Microsoft’s feature goal for Office 2007. This version is less about sticking new features into its productivity suite than it is about making that suite more attractive to a customer base that has been sorely tempted by OpenOffice–and will eventually be tempted by online Web 2.0 applications.

To that end, the ribbon really is easier–it’s just going to take you a couple of weeks to see it. And it’ll take the average user probably a ltitle longer than that. But once they get used to it, I do agree with Microsoft that it’ll take hold of their minds and fingers. Just make sure someone’s decently trained in it and manning the help desk phones before deploying across the organization.

Microsoft’s other goal for Office 2007 is to differentiate itself as much as possible from its new competitors. And in typical Microsoft fashion, that means doing something new while playing to its strengths. What’s Redmond got that OpenOffice doesn’t? One word:

Servers.

Microsoft’s library of interlocking back office servers is as big as anyone’s, and they’re strongly trying to use that to their advantage. All the Office apps get new feature abiities when connected to SharePoint services and the MOSS server (aka the Office Server) adds even more. Further, for SMB customers who mayhap can’t afford all that back-office mubo jumbo in house, Office Live will be serving up similar features in a hosted model–look for announcements and reviews on those services soon.

We’ll be reviewing all that stuff in upcoming posts, including how it works with InfoPath 2007 and the new Groove 2007–a new shared workspace collaboration tool that comes in the client Office 2007 package because it works in P2P mode (no servers required). We’ll also be looking at how SharePoint, MOSS, Exchange 2007, Project Server 2007 and Small Business Server all work together. Yeah, I’m looking to do that in Hawaii.

So that’s the intro: Office 2007 has a cool new look and a bright future in collaboration. So how’s the basic stuff work? Check the next post to see.