Features

With a large application suite like Microsoft Office, planning for the next release starts even before the last one is out of the door. Office 2007 was released to business customers in November 2006, with the full public launch held in February 2007, but as the marketing people ramped up their efforts in the run up to the launch, so the design and programming team had already moved on to start thinking about what it would do next.

So as not to lose possible sales to superstitious people, Microsoft will skip the "unlucky" version number 13 and the next version of Office will be called 14. Until the marketing people state otherwise, Office 14 will just be known as that, although it will probably end up being named Office 2009 (assuming they hit that year). The only deviation from year-based names has been Office XP, which should by rights have been called Office 2002. However, the marketing department very badly wanted to tie it to Windows XP, which was being released at the same time. This act of bravado and stupidity caused endless problems for IT support people, because users often didn't or couldn't distinguish between Windows XP and Office XP, and would simply refer to "XP", as in "I reinstalled XP and it still doesn't work". Arrgh! In the run up to the release of Office 12, I repeatedly threatened to publicly disembowel any Microsoft marketing person who suggested naming it "Office Vista".

Office 14 timeline

In the second half of 2006, Microsoft gathered all the feedback from the Office

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2007 beta testers and researched what they had expressed the wish to see in the next version. Early in 2007 the company then decided what areas the Office team should concentrate on, and did market research with key customers to validate those plans.

All the while, the design and programming teams have been at work and the first beta test version is on track to be delivered in the first half of this year. Beta 1 will be a closed affair with a limited number of participants, who will probably be required to sign non-disclosure agreements. Beta 2 will most likely be open to the public, as was the case with Office 2007, and this is expected to happen later in 2008. The full release isn't expected until the first half of 2009.

Details of precisely what changes are going to be incorporated into Office 14 are still sketchy, but they'll certainly be concentrated into six distinct areas, building on what's already there in Office 2007:

Enterprise Content Management Here, Microsoft plans to build on the integration of Office with SharePoint to make it easier for end users to take advantage of the power of SharePoint and reducing the burden on system administrators. In a veritable blizzard of buzzwords, the press releases tend to refer to "Flexible Storage Solutions for Digital Asset Management." FSSfDAM? Perhaps not...

Communication and Collaboration Opportunities for collaboration using Office Communicator, SharePoint, Outlook, OneNote and Groove are set to expand, using what Microsoft nebulously refers to as "unified identity and robust policy/compliance support".

Business Process and Business Intelligence Finding and analysing data is a big part of what Office is good at, particularly by using Excel, SharePoint and InfoPath. You can expect an expansion of the workflow capabilities in SharePoint and probably new and improved data visualisation options in Excel and Visio.

Individual Impact Microsoft has said it wants to make individual workers more self-sufficient by letting them perform more complex tasks and giving them access to more self- and community-based help.