Microsoft Office 2007

This morning I attended a Microsoft briefing about the future version of Office, and I have to say I'm kind of excited.  We're a big Microsoft campus, so we tend to take advantage of many of their products.  A few notes from this morning:

• The Office 2007 Beta 2 will be available in the next month or so
• SharePoint Services (are any of you using this--if so, I'd really like to discuss with you as we are implementing 2003 soon) will be considerably more integrated with the Office suite.  We saw several demos of this in action and I was impressed.
• SharePoint Services should include built-in blog and wiki tools!
• Outlook should include several new features, including:
  • Instant Search.  Finally, finally it appears, the default, easy-to-find search is the Advanced Search!
  • Better task integration with the calendar.  I've always been one to post an all-day event to remind myself to do something rather than create a task, but I just might use tasks more after seeing the way tasks neatly display on the calendar.
  • Calendar overlays.  Outlook 2003 offers viewing two calendars side-by-side (great for my team calendar and student schedule), but this takes it one step further by combining the two into a single calendar view.  Neat.
  • Last but definitely not least, Outlook will support the viewing of RSS subscriptions!
• The menus will be considerably different across most of the suite.  I'd seen screen shots before, but it was helpful to watch the live demo.  Apparently 67% of requested features for future versions of Office were already inside their products, so they are making a big effort to make menu options easier to find and organizing them more intuitively.  Hopefully it will help, but I suspect it will take awhile for my users to recover from the shock of something so different.

I just might download the beta next month and check it out for myself.

Comments

[Juliane Schneider]

Wow - it sounds really interesting, especially the WIKI tools. Our company uses our WIKI for just about everything, but I find it clumsy to deal with for the most part. Having some tools to make it more intuitive would be great.