Calling it a first public viewing, Microsoft on Friday gave attendees at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Minneapolis a glimpse of the next version of Office, called Office 12, due late next year.Chris Caposella, a corporate vice president with Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, offered a brief demonstration of a distributed forms capability designed to help users submit XML-based forms using only a browser. Users can submit forms without the need to have Microsoft’s InfoPath present on their system, and will have the ability to share the form through e-mail.Caposella said the company will offer up a richer assortment of details on Office 12 this September at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. Caposella also demonstrated Maestro, now called the Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager, that is due to arrive sometime this fall.Also at the WPC on Friday company officials told partners it still intends to ship the desktop version of the next version of Windows, code named Longhorn, by the end of 2006. They said they also still plan to offer a beta version of the long awaited operating system for corporate users this summer although that version would not have the new Aero graphical user interface. They added that said a developer version of Longhorn will also be available at the PDC in September. Technology Industry