An Outside Look Inside Office 12

Paul Thurrott continues to provide some great information and insight into Office 12 and all thinks Windows for that matter.

One of the interesting trivia facts he shares in his article is that the initial Microsoft Word had about 100 commands that were accessible through the menu based navigation system. Microsoft Word 2003 on the other hand, has more than 1500! You can quickly understand how some changes in structure and navigation on using those commands effectively would be important.

Over the years, Microsoft has tried to address these problems by adding new user interface elements that expose functionality in more discoverable ways. Task panes, Smart Tags, and smart menus are all examples of these efforts. But these efforts really just maxed the complexity problems in Microsoft Office and were, in Microsoft’s own words, a way to just “paint the pig” and not actually fix the core problem. Clearly, a daring new user interface was required. And about two years ago, Microsoft began working on what would become the new Office 12 user interface.

Paul Thurrott spoke with Jensen Harris and Jacob Jaffe who are intimately involve with the development of Office 12. Through his conversations, he found out that Microsoft was looking to address four core customer needs:

1. workforce evolution
2. one world of business
3. always on, always connected
4. transparent organizations

Specifically of interest in the workforce evolution was the following quote from Jacob stated:

And the younger generation–those people who are in college today–are using blogging, social networking, and other technologies today in ways that haven’t previously been used in the workforce. As these people enter the workforce, there is an expectation that they will continue to use technology in those new ways. So Office 12 must help both of these groups of people get better results faster.

Obviously it’s a no brainer that blogging and social networking, tagging, and such would be important to the workforce of today and tomorrow. But the question does become, how do you integrate that efficiently so it’s useful and meaningful in an business productivity application environment?

Paul’s thorough review is only Part 1 of what is to come. In the article he goes on to discuss details of Word, Outlook, OneNote and InfoPath, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Read the full article: Inside Office 12, Part 1 by Paul Thurrott