Here's what I'm excited about in the next release of Office (Currently called Office 12).
Enterprise Content Management
Nearly every organization we work with is using a different technology to work with external web content and internal portal content. The reason for this, I believe, is that in the past, managing web content has always been a different beast than managing documents, collaborative workspaces and enterprise content and applications. These differences, however, are cleverly addressed in the next version of Office 12, and I think the following worlds are finally coming together in a very cohesive way:
- Records Management
- Document Management
- Web Content Management
- Form Based Content Collection & Management
- LOB Data Management
More details on the Microsoft direction for this merger of technologies can be found here:
Microsoft's ECM Vision
Business Intelligence Improvements
To me, BI suffers in one key area: How do users SEE the data that has been painstakingly optimized for reporting. This has caused some major problems for organizations:
- High costs of 3rd party BI visualization products, which don't really integrate with tools like excel for complex reporting
- Painful development time for creating rich drill down reports that have good user interfaces
- Frustrated managers and executives that have to muddle over excel or pivot table complexity to see their data
There's a TON coming to improve this in Office 12:
- Much much better data visualization in Excel (such as being able to quickly apply color shading visualization)
- Improved Pivot Table Reports (create excel documents that have the functionality of Pivot Tables but are disconnected from the awkwardness of the Pivot Table user interface) (See an example of both new Pivot table UI and Visualization in the Excel O12 Blog)
- Rich Visio integration for super data visualization
- Excel Services (You've got to visit this Microsoft Excel Blog)
- Better web based management of the "report and BI dashboard"
- KPI management & Business Scorecard features built into the products
Richer access to Line of Business Data
So you're typing up a contract for a client. Ideally you'd attach that client name as meta data to the document so you could find it better later. In Office 12, connecting to data stored in a line of business system is, well, easy. Office 12 deals with this. From a business perspective, imaging surfacing data stored in Line of Business systems to your portal so that all users in your organization can see that data. I'm anxious to connect this to our CRM at Habanero so we can see contacts, opportunities, activities, and project details for our clients one one cohesive SharePoint page. Keep your ear out for this term:
- Business Data Catalog
From a technical perspective, I couldn't do this as much justice about this new technology as Eli Robillard does in his blog.
Much Much Better Search
The way we think about Enterprise search has been flipped 180 degrees in Office 12, and in a good way. Besides better algorithms, look for:
- The ability to search structured data out of the box
- Social networking searches
- A flexible search user interface
- General feature improvement (hit highlighting, "did you mean" spelling checker, etc.)
Greater access to content in Documents and Spreadsheets
Our Single Source Publishing Solutions are specifically targeting reusing content that sits in Word Documents for reuse on the web, PDA, phone, etc. or for LOB data integration. In some ways, our solutions are only relevant and successful because the technology is still a bit weak at addressing the need to separate content from presentation logic. Office 12 and the new XML based file formats address this head on, allowing a much better separation between content and styling (and improved ways of manipulating both).
Better Accessibility
Office 12 is really looking to gain broader reach. We see this in:
- Web based forms created by InfoPath
- Support for greater authentication mechanisms
- Broader reach of SharePoint functionality into Internets & Extranets
- Improved UI
This one is going to come up so much in future blogs, I'll stop there.
