Interview: New elements of Office 2003

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 22 Oct 2003 at 13:02

At the official launch event of Office System, we talked with Neil Laver, Group Marketing Manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Group, about some of the new features of the productivity suite.

What's the reasoning behind the introduction of new desktop apps to the Office range?

I think that organisations are expecting users to do more - to make more of an impact with what they've got. If you go into detail about how people work at the moment - if you think about what they do it is about taking the power of Office into new areas.

Scribbling notes, in the case of OneNote?

Yes, briefly, OneNote, is about taking notes, and you're doing that right now on paper. Don't expect an overnight revolution - all of a sudden everyone's using a Tablet PC or a laptop with OneNote - but increasingly there are significant advantages in moving notetaking into a digital format, and that's what OneNote is about. It's all about collecting and collating information in one place. It's not easy to do that at the moment in Word.

So why not make improvements to Word?

We have come across customers that take meeting notes in Word and collate information in Word, but really OneNote is a much more powerful way of doing that. One of the things you could do, for instance, is that during this conversation you could be taking notes on a PC, and it synchronises the notes with the voice recording. So when, tomorrow, or a year's time, you click on a particular point and you can't quite remember the context of the note you were taking, you can actually listen to what I was saying at that particular point in time.

Who are your target customers for OneNote?

If you are taking an hour's meeting or an hour's lecture if you are student, the fact that you've got the original handwritten notes and the original recording is a very powerful proposition. The storage of information on there is very efficient. I'm sure if I was student, it would be a killer app for me, and equally for a journalist, consultant, or people who spend a lot of time in meetings, it could be a significant advantage.

Is OneNote derived from your work with Tablet PCs?

Not really. It supports Ink, of course, but apart from this every feature can be used by a tradional desktop PC user.

And it is a standalone application?

Yes, it is a standalone app and is not part of the Office suite.

Where does InfoPath fit in?

The other new area is InfoPath and what our customers tell us is that the thing people spend a lot of time doing is filling out forms. In my working week, I think about the forms I get sent in Word documents, I get forms in PowerPoint slides, embedded within emails - PDF files are a classic thing: print them out and fill them in by pen and send them back - so we all spend a lot of time completing forms.

And what will InfoPath solve?

InfoPath allows developers, and pretty much anyone else, to easily create forms.

If you open InfoPath it actually looks a lot like Word and that's on purpose. We're giving people an environment with which they're familliar, so they don't have to be retrained. And by doing it in this environment, as opposed to a browser or some other less intelligent interface, they are being offered the kinds of things they expect from Office, such as spell-checking, rich text, and you've got undo buttons and everything else with which you're familiar from Word.

So it just looks nicer?

But there's intelligence behind the product, so we can plug in to multiple systems. For example, if you think of a form, say a new order from a customer, then the form is smart enough to connect to your CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) and bring in information from that system. And in another part of the form it can bring in information from, say, your finance department, and then bring in information from your HR database...