Gallery

Office "14" slips further

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:39

Simon Jones is proved right about the launch date of office "14", finds quince useful for UI design, and creates a whole new save icon.

Also demonstrated was the Gemini Add-In for Excel, which adds "self-service" Business Intelligence (BI) that enables you to discover relevant data sources and sort, filter and report on hundreds of millions of rows of data. Select, sort and filter your data in Gemini - creating on-the-fly mash-ups of different tables if necessary - and it will automatically infer the relationships between these tables, even when they come from different data sources. It constructs the relevant data cubes and dimensions without you even having to know what a data cube or a dimension are. Finally, the data is presented in Excel using the standard Pivot Table and Pivot Chart functions, as well as a new "slices" concept, and you get to slice, dice and pivot the data to your heart's content.

Gemini is expected to ship as part of SQL Server "Kilimanjaro" in 2010 - an update to the Analysis Services module, not the entire product - and it will integrate with SharePoint and Excel Services as well as Excel to produce compelling, easy-to-use BI and corporate information solutions that anyone can drive. The aim is that BI solutions should take end-users only minutes or hours to produce, rather than days or weeks of expensive IT staff or consultants' time.

Office 2007 SP2

Details are starting to emerge of what's likely to be included in Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, which should be available at some point in the very near future. Outlook, for instance, is getting a big boost in performance and reliability - SP2 should make it start up faster by reducing disk I/O and response times, and moving long operations out of the initial startup sequence. It should also be able to switch folders or views faster - particularly when there are many thousands of items in those folders - and will shut down more reliably, no matter whether there are operations pending.

Outlook's close-down behaviour depends on whether all the add-ins, devices and external processes that are using Outlook data are cooperative and will release their locks - one that often won't is Outlook Live Connector 12.1, which fetches email from Microsoft's Office Live and Hotmail services. If Outlook can't shut down because some such external process isn't relinquishing its locks, it will now put a new icon in the System Tray to inform you, so you'll no longer need to check in Task Manager just to be sure. Complex calendar operations should also be more reliable, with fewer cases where items are inexplicably duplicated or deleted through synchronisation errors. There should also be fewer instances where Outlook has to check the integrity of its data files when starting up.

Most of these improvements stem from optimisations to the local storage engine for both PST and OST files. These files may become slightly larger (about 20% on average) in future, but the performance gains are deemed to be worth it. Microsoft has also taken a hard look at the processing of the user interface, particularly in situations where the UI becomes unresponsive not due to any action the user might have taken. If you ask Outlook to do something and it puts up a "wait" cursor for a couple of seconds you can live with that, but users rightly complain when they're about to do something but can't because Outlook shows the wait cursor before they get a chance to click anything. There are already a few operations that get delegated to background tasks, so that control can be returned to the user sooner - one example being when dismissing or snoozing a reminder. From SP2 onward all such changes will be queued, rather than executed immediately, so you'll get a snappy, responsive dialog but your changes won't be written to disk until some later time when there are processor cycles to spare. People who use POP3 or IMAP email should notice a big change, too, as their emails will download in a more sensible order and without freezing Outlook's user interface, so you can get on with other tasks while it happens.