Wanting to build out a significantly broader ecosystem for its Office 2003 desktop suite as well as for its Office-branded servers, Microsoft has some ambitious plans to increase the number of authorized developers and systems integrators over the next year.According to Chris Capossela, a corporate vice president with Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, the company would like to grow its existing 70,000 partners to “two to four times” that many over the next year. The company plans to spend $20 million over that time on partner training.Capossela admits that many Office users both large and small complain that they do not get enough help from Microsoft on how to get more functional use out of the product to address some of their individual application needs. “We want to move from being a productivity vendor of choice to a productivity partner of choice. We need to work better with users who need to get more capability out of Office. They need more technical tips and tricks in order to solve specific problems they have, like putting out an RFP,” Capossela said.Nonetheless, Capossela said that at just past the one year anniversary of Office 2003, product deployments are markedly ahead of those of it predecessor, Office XP, after its first year in the market. He declined to offer specific numbers comparing the two.Microsoft’s Information Worker Productivity group raked in $10.8 billion in revenues for the fiscal year ending June 30, a healthy 17 per cent increase over the last year. Largely responsible for that increase were the vertical editions of Office, including the ones for small- and medium-size businesses and the one for teachers and students. Also notably making contributions to the increase were the SharePoint Portal Server and Live Meeting. Microsoft will continue to look at delivering more Office-branded servers that better tie together the applications within Office 2003 System. Currently the company has Project and Project Server, Office 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server and Outlook and Exchange.Capossela again declined to discuss reports that the company was working on an InfoPath Forms Server and a new Excel Calculation Server.“It is way too early in our thinking to talk about those types of products. We haven’t even thought about how we might package such servers,” Capossela said. He added, however, that the ongoing concept of Office System applications, servers and services is the strategic direction the company continues to head in. As far as the progress being made on Office 12, or Wave 12 as Microsofters refer to it, Capossela was again mum. He would only say that the upcoming release, like the several releases before it, is on a consistent “two- to-three-year” release schedule which would put its delivery no later than October, 2006.– By Ed Scannell Technology Industry