At its annual CEO Summit on Thursday, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will offer up some details about the next version of Office, called Office 12, and lay out how he feels it fits in with his company’s “New World of Work” vision.Due into beta sometime this fall, Office 12 represents a “significant development,” Gates is expected to explain during his keynote, that will advance information work in this new world. The upcoming version, not expected to be delivered until late 2006, is expected to help users better manage their communication and collaboration in a unified environment as well as to more readily visualize and extract important in-sights from large amounts of incoming data.Gates will contend that information workers will prove to be the driving force behind business innovations and that for them to adapt and succeed in the new world of work they need more sophisticated tools that help them apply whatever unique talents and experience and judgment that can have a positive impact on their respective businesses. “Office 12 has a couple of key areas of focus such as allowing users to better connect with partners and customers through new and simpler ways of collaborating. Right now you work with other people through e-mail, instant messaging but in the future users will have greater control over how people reach you and what type of context you want to be contacted in,” said Betsy Frost, senior director of marketing and strategy for Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Group.Gates will outline how he believes workplace trends such as the shift from manufacturing to a services-oriented economy will shape and direct technology innovation over the next 10 years, along with the growing need for people collaborate more effectively across companies and time zones.He will also discuss other forces in play including the increasingly larger and more complex stream of information that workers must deal with in an “always on, always connected” environment, as well as greater demands for transparency and accountability of business processes. “In the transparent organization companies have to be more accountable because of regulatory concerns, but there is also this notion of the enterprise content lifecycle. Companies that can efficiently collaborate and can create, track and manage content securely will give IT the ability to centrally define archival and expiration policies that will naturally integrate Word and Excel,” Frost said. Software Development