OfficeRocker!

seems to be a good deal of chatter recently about our support for the modified version of Open XML that resulted from the rigorous ratification process. 

The best summary of the story I found is over on Oliver Bell's blog here so I won't retype it here.

I guess people do just expect Microsoft to pull quality code out of a hat these days but it will take some time to bring Office 2007 back in line with the modified standard.  This was always going to be the case.  This should not be interpreted by anyone as any sort of reluctance on our part to do the work, quite to opposite. 

The debate came from this comment Alex Brown made in his post about this effort:

Given Microsoft's proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that MS Office will shortly be brought into line with the 29500 specification, and will stay that way. Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO/IEC standard was to discourage Microsoft from this kind of file format rug-pulling stunt in future.

As Chris Capossela said:

We’ve listened to the global community and learned a lot, and we are committed to supporting the Open XML specification that is approved by ISO/IEC in our products.

More commentary from Doug Mahugh on that post from Alex which is a good read.  In his comments he says:

Yes, Max, the day that the vote passed our products didn't automatically start supporting the changes that were made to the spec in recent weeks.  And keep in mind that the final spec isn't even available yet from ISO/IEC.

I'm doubtful that there has ever been a product that has supported a standard as of the day it was ratified, but if that has happened then it would have to be a standard that was not materially improved or modified during the standardization process.  That's not the case here: the standards process improved the IS29500 text, and we're all better off for that in the long run.

and later:

we've not announced any details like that yet but I'll post details when we have them.  One thing to keep in mind is that most users want interop across the widest possible variety of implementations.

Every day on the blogsphere (I hate that word) I see one topic of discussion come up a lot.  I have talked about it often too - how to make the transition to the new UI.  There is good debate to be had about why we needed to make this switch from the traditional menus but at the same time take people with us.

I won't go over all the same ground again but have a look at coping with change and also the ever useful Jensen Harris blog for more.  There is also some great research by Forrester on the Fluent UI and how it is adopted by Information Workers.  This research showed found that within 2 weeks users are up to speed with the new interface. Within 10 weeks users are creating documents 17% faster on average than before.

However I also see people still wanting the old menus back and wanting to recreate 2003 on 2007.  There is no way to do this because if there was we wouldn't have needed to make this change of approach.  Although we do have the quick access toolbar to put frequently used features, there is not a way to recreate menus like 2003.  From a developer perspective though, the Fluent UI is extremely customisable.

Just today for example there is a user asking to put their menus back and every day there is another post about the truly terrible classic UI tools (I won't even give you a link).  They are terrible because all  they do is put some menus inside a tab and as soon as you click on one of them you are still going to get galleries, live previews and the rest of the Fluent UI.  See my post classic mode for 2007 on why this is a chocolate teapot solution.  I think this is barking up the wrong tree - the real question is can you help me find my feature in the new layout while I get used to it.  There are of course the really fab interactive command reference guides which can be installed as part of the build now. 

Another part of the Microsoft Office team went public today so I am allowed to share it with all of you.   it is part of an incubation project group call officelabs internal to Microsoft.  This group, headed up by Chris Pratley (creator of OneNote) focuses on testing out ideas that might one day make it into products.  They partner with product teams across the Microsoft Business Division to rapidly prototype concepts and act as a resource to further the innovation process through collaboration.  This is being extended out to the public now so you can get a flavour of some of these longer term ideas.

Two projects that are available today are the Search commands and Community Clips projects.  I use both from time to time.  The Search commands idea is like putting stabilisers when you learn to ride a bike, after a while you take them off again but it does help when you are learning the new UI.  The community clips add-in lets you create little homemade demos right from within Office.  It handles all the recording, screen capture and audio recording all from one simple to use tab inside the Office apps.

These are NOT supported feature, or even betas, I must emphasise - they aren't even Office 14 features but they are interesting as is the premise of the whole group so do check it out at www.officelabs.com

here is one more screenshot where I searched for borders.  If you hover over one of the results, it shows you where the feature is in the ribbon and if you click on a drop down you can start using the feature directly.

In case you missed the nearly unbelievable promotion we have running for uni students and teachers at www.theultimatesteal.co.uk you only have till Weds night this week to take advantage of it before it closes.  If you are a student, tell your friends, this is a great offer.  Some people got worried about whether this was a legit microsoft site - I can assure you it is so please don't miss out!

more info on the excellent Higher Education Blog.  Amusingly they got the countdown wrong for a while due to a mistake with a system clock.

Skydrive comes out of beta

Beta is over for http://skydrive.live.com and the new version increases the storage by 4Gb to 5Gb! I use this to put my presentations in on the right column on the blog - easy to imbed the link with the icon

Interoperability announcements

there is a lot to read about here.

The one thing I wanted to pull out:  Steve Ballmer says:

Second, in the area of data portability, we recognize that different users definitely support different file formats for different reasons. And we have consistently supported multiple file formats and user choice. But, as part of today's announcement specifically, we're announcing that we're designing new APIs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint that will allow developers to plug in additional document formats, and enable users to set those formats as their default for saving documents.

New Microsoft Office Live Small Business launched

Simple Windows Live ID signup process. No need to validate with a credit card any more !

Used by nearly 600,000 customers worldwide, Office Live Small Business is available in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan. The service also provides an excellent environment within which partners can build industry-specific solutions.

Office Live Small Business is now available with :

• Full Firefox 2.0 support for PC & Mac
• Easy-to-use Website Designer tool or use html/3rd party design tools
• Outlook Connector for offline synching of email, calendar, contacts & tasks
• Mobile access to email, calendar and contacts from Windows-Powered SmartPhones or PocketPCs
• Solutions Packager for Web designers

FREE when you sign up :

• Domain name *
• 500MB fully hosted Website
• Up to 100 email accounts
• Contact Manager
• Document Manager
• Project Manager
• Workspace

* (.co.uk free for the first 2 years or .com, org, net, .eu free for the first year)

Additional affordable features :

• E-mail marketing beta
• Search marketing
• More storage, users and tools

What are you wating for ? Read more details and signup now at : smallbusiness.officelive.com

There is also a partner portal at http://dev.officelive.com/

Gates hints at our plans for Office 14 on the web

Like the plot of Lost, answers are coming.. but just not yet and not here

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/11/Office-14-to-be-more-Web-friendly-Gates-says_1.html

New SharePoint deployment whitepaper

sure to be a popular resource, the new "Plan to deploy Office SharePoint Server globally" section on technet.

Office books

People are asking a lot about what books we are publishing about office so here is a useful link to see all the books we have. 

Humans can only think about 4 things at once

People who think they can do more are probably just doing them badly says a new report

It is still worth pointing out to everyone that Office 2007 is designed to run on Windows XP sp2 and above.  So if you just live.com/yahoo/googled this, welcome and let me assure you..

You don't need to have Windows Vista to run it.  From a spec perspective, in general if your PC can run Office 2003, you should find Office 2007 runs fine on it as well. 

I think most home users assume that they need to get Vista rather than just upgrading Office on their current Windows XP PC. 

It is also worth pointing out that Vista is extremely successful - we are deploying at or ahead of the rate that Windows XP did after its launch.  The delay in perception keeping up with reality has resulted in many wrong judgements about the ease of Vista with driver issues largely resolved by vendors.  I was talking with John Curran, director of the Windows business in the UK, about this yesterday - I'll try and get an interview with him soon.

So now you are assured, why not download a free trial?

link to the official system requirements is here.

With the ballot resolution later this month, the temperature is high around the issues on Open XML.  On our side we believe that Open XML is solving a different problem to ODF and so we supported it through fast track.  IBM and others have decided to see this as a "war on standards" - mad because multiple standards in an area is the norm - look at picture formats for example.  Can't we all coexist?

A commenter on Brian's blog noted though that IBM itself is starting to support Open XML in some products.  See the full article about this on Doug's blog.  More on IBM support for Open XML in this Computerworld article.  Also now we see Google support for Open XML where they render an Open XML in their own renderer.

In the UK we have recently published a series of interesting stories from customers who are implementing Open XML and who talk about the benefits to them in doing so:

EasyJet

Elegant resorts

QinetiQ

Park Group

Paul Smith

If you have to pick one, I'd recommend the QinetiQ story.  A very interesting customer - the ex DERA guys who have 10,000 scientists working on all manner of cutting edge defence technologies for the MOD and other governments.  They have to store designs for 30 years or more in some cases so document formats are a big issue for them.  They are also interested in seeing how they can get more value from meta data and policies on documents - as delivered by Open XML.  One very interesting area they are thinking about is how to break documents into component content blocks and tagging them individually, by author or via a corporate project taxonomy.  As one of the largest consumers of third party research feeds, QQ might even be able to tag external content in this way, streaming the latest research to staff without needing them to read the whole journal if say there is one page in the middle that is relevant.

This is the best Open XML solution thinking I have come across to date.  Personally I'm not that into the religious debates - no doubt I'll be flamed on this post by the slashdotters. I'm more interested in what customers are saying and doing and taking my lead from that.  Maybe with wider industry support emerging, we as an industry are finally moving past the vitriol and back to delivering to our customers.

Good interview on cnn with Bill Gates about how he says we need to "tweak" capitalism to work better for the poorest 2bn people in the world. another vid of him, bono and michael dell talk about the (RED) campaign.  A bit of an annoying shouty interviewer but worth a look.

If you like this kind of thinking, you might enjoy Patrick Dixon - a futurologist and commentator on ethics.

Three stories about small businesses using Office Live to get their businesses up and running. 

Algarvesol - how a couple made renting out their apartment in Algarve a lot more professional with an online site with Office Live.

Sublime - an enterprising pair who set up a mobile juice bar company expanded to sell premium fresh cocktails.  They built a great site with Office Live as their online marketing.

Rebecca Swift - Training company offering distance learning courses promotes her business with Office Live.

The case study links are:

• Algarvesol story
• Sublime story
• Rebecca Swift story

You can find out all about Office Live at www.officelive.co.uk

Good to see the Excel User Group site that is run by the new MVP for Excel, Nick Hodge. 

Ian has posted the answers to his Office quiz - some of them are not quite right IMHO :-)

Office Quiz

I'm liking Ian Moulster's quiz on Office 2007.  How many can you get - even I struggled with some of them.  He's going to publish the answers next week..

Progress of Office Open XML

We are busy preparing for the Ballot Resolution Meeting on the ISO Office Open XML ratification progress.  A few people have been asking me what's been happening on that front and I've not really been blogging about it because it is well covered on other Microsoft blogs.  If you are interested in how things are going, have a look at Gray's blog and of course the ever font-of-all-knowledgey Brian Jones' blog.

Mac Office 2008

Has shipped and you can get lots of information about it at the newly moved macmojo blog that now resides at www.officeformac.com/blog

People are surprised to find out that our team has no responsibility for Mac Office, it is a completely different business unit, the Mac BU.  This has some big advantages because it means that we learn from each other - before Office 2007, the latest release was Mac Office 2004 and inspired some of what you see in 2007.  In Mac Office 2008 you see some things from the Windows version - like galleries for example and SmartArt but other things are different - like no ribbon.  This helps to ensure that the Mac product is really designed for the Mac by Mac developers.

Customer story: Alzheimer's Society deploy Unified Communications

You can read this interesting story here.  They are using Office Communication Server and Office Live Meeting to revamp their communications software.

The use of OLM will enable the Society to run live broadcasts of training sessions and meetings so people can attend remotely. OLM will then archive the session to enable users to access the information at a later date. Phil Shoesmith, head of IT at The Alzheimer's Society said: "At present we are spending a great deal of time and money on travelling for meetings and training sessions and cutting out unnecessary business travel will not only save time and reduce spend but also generate environmental benefits."

Competitive Success Depends on Enablement

Interesting article from the Economist Intelligence Unit (sponsored by Microsoft) about what it takes to enable employees.  Top of the survey was tools:

Achieving true enablement cannot be done overnight. Although there is no one path to follow, the study points out general steps that successful companies have taken. Among the tools that the surveyed companies most frequently cited as improving employee enablement are:

• Data warehousing
• Knowledge management
• Project management
• Content management

Also high on the list are portals, collaborative software, instant messaging, and employee and customer contact databases.

And finally

Lastly, (this really is random) look what someone (no idea who) left on my desk today - talk about eating your own dogfood..

nice little summary of OneNote powertoys that the guys in the OneNote testing team have written over on John Guin's blog.

The Burton Group, a respected AR firm targeting the enterprise technologist, has published “What’s up .doc—ODF, Open XML and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications”—a 35+ page examination of document formats, most notably ODF and Open XML. 

This is a very interesting read.  Guy Creese, one of the authors has blogged about it here. 

As he says in his post:

Please note that this overview, like all Burton Group research, is a completely vendor-independent perspective; Burton Group does not engage in vendor “white papers” or other vendor-paid writing projects. This is another way to say we'll probably ruffle some vendor feathers on this one, but we've tried hard to look into this objectively and in some detail (the report is 37 pages long).

It also builds on themes we’ve covered in other recent research, including next-generation hypertext, DITA and other means of improving XML content reusability, and XQuery. Collectively, we believe these advances will fundamentally improve the ways information workers collaborate and manage content.

As we do not have distribution rights I can't say any more but the paper takes a very balanced, non religious and thorough look at what ODF and Open XML bring and how customers can get value from them. 

You can get a free copy of it (for a limited period) direct from their site here.  This is well worth a read if you are involved in deploying Office 2007 or in debates about the standards.

Did you see the flurry of interest in this issue with Office 2003 sp3? Essentially sp3 blocks certain *very* old file formats for security reasons and this understandably got some people annoyed.  The error which was not a bug was "You are attempting to open a file that was created in an earlier version of Microsoft Office. This file type is blocked from opening in this version by your registry policy setting"

I must confess I rather teflon'd this interview to Reed in the US who handled it really well.  Although we did have a reg hack to remove the block, it was pretty hard to implement.  In response to the feedback we've issued much simpler .reg file links to sort out the issue.

The post from the Register is a very nicely written and quite funny piece from Mark Whitehorn which is worth a read.  Here is a taster:

The word draconian seemed appropriate, so we used it with Reed Shaffner, Microsoft Office Worldwide Product Manager. Very disarmingly, he agreed.

“Yes, I agree, it was too draconian.” he said. We hate it when Product Managers do that.

Check out the official blog post from David Le Blanc on the rationale behind the decisions and the solution.  The comments are long but deeply get into the issues if you have time.  I think David does a great job of handling the slashdotters politely.  I particularly liked this part of one of his comments:

please try to be polite in public. Your main point of "why didn't you just fix the older parsers?" didn't need expletives to get the point across. You're speaking to a person here. It's also in your self-interest - employers do use web searches to help make hiring decisions. Wag more. Bark less

In a $1.2bn purchase, Microsoft is offering to acquire the Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer (FAST).  This is being reviewed as a very positive move by the industry analysts as it more or less completes our end to end search offerings.  From free search all the way up to sophisticated niche search technology, we have it all now.

Good summary: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/010808-microsoft-bids-for-fast-search.html

David Tebbutt over at Freeform Dynamics says:

So what to make of the latest news, that Microsoft is to buy search company FAST? I am stunned. Truly. I take my hat off to Microsoft for this move. Forget about the staff meltdown that FAST has experienced recently, the fact is that this company has a great reputation and some solid clients. I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of Microsoft to win key developers back, if it wanted to ... Now, in a single stroke, the company puts itself in contention with these other major players. Assuming the deal goes through, it immediately removes one of the major stumbling blocks with large scale implementation of SharePoint Server—that of being able to draw information together from multiple hierarchical silos. If the integration with SharePoint is done well and if the missing bits of the social computing stack are added, then Microsoft will have leapfrogged the industry and incredibly strengthened its position.

Angela Ashenden at MWD is also positive but notes that integration of the customer base and FAST own recent acquisitions may be a challenge:

Clearly, as a best-of-breed solution, the FAST ESP software is more sophisticated, powerful and flexible than Microsoft's own capabilities, and its configurable, non-black box, approach to search has the potential to fit in well with Microsoft's products. However, FAST has a significant existing customer base which will need to be handled carefully to avoid giving too much advantage to Autonomy or smaller players such as Endeca, and it will be interesting to see whether the software remains a distinct business or becomes part of the Microsoft SharePoint Server solution

Sarah Burnett from Butler calls the acquisition:

a shrewd move that gives the software giant one of the world’s most advanced enterprise search software

Mike Davies from Ovum is quoted as saying

Microsoft was making a clever move and putting itself into the top league of enterprise search providers. “It is certain to make other large vendors look at the acquisition of high-end solution providers rather than develop their own [enterprise search software].”

Guy Creese of Burton Group sums up nicely how this completes our portfolio:

This is a huge coup for Microsoft in the enterprise search space. After futzing around for years, Microsoft finally started to get serious with search in SharePoint 2007. It's not perfect--clients have started to tell me the boundary conditions they're running into--but it's a lot better than search was in SharePoint 2003. If you split the search market into three sectors: (1) cheap and OK, (2) relatively inexpensive and an 80% solution, and (3) expensive and sophisticated, Microsoft is targeting tier two with SharePoint Search. Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express is its answer to tier one (see my previous blog post here), and the FAST acquisition is its answer to tier three.

Other reviews:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/08/Microsofts-bid-for-FAST-bolsters-enterprise-search_1.html

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc2008018_832182.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

http://www.computing.co.uk/vnunet/news/2206670/microsoft-offers-2bn-fast

http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/01/08/microsoft-fast-google-markets-equity-cx_ll_0108markets06.html

Peter de Haas put together all the analyst reports we have distribution rights for which includes some recent search ones from Forrester and Gartner.