OK so here I am: directly in Redmond, waiting for Bill Gates himself to appear on stage to open the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference (MOSDC) 2006! The idea will be to blog directly (I hope that the wireless network connection does not fade away!) and to add the most important points about his speech.
Stay tuned and reload the page! The speech will start at 0900 AM (Seattle time, which is GMT -8, or CET -9).
Well the wireless connection DID disappear from the keynote conference room (was it intentional?), but anyway, here’s the important stuff of Billg’s keynote:
- Billg says that this release of Office is revolutionary.
- It seems that Bill got deeply involved in the development of Office 2007
- Yes, Microsoft Office System 2007 (MOS 2007) is the official name, what would also give some hints about the availability of the whole thing…
- There are huge trends nowadays:
- New Intel chips and higher computing power
- New hardware (Origami not mentioned but implied in his speech)
- Service-Oriented Architectures
- Digital lifestyle goes mainstream
- Digital economy pervasive
- MOS 2007 structure: client/server; with product offerings for each side
- MOS 2007 is based in XML formats for all document types
- New standards community: openXMLDeveloper.org; Billg brags about the three words he likes most… “Open” (?), “XML” and “Developer”, all together in the same URL :) Intel and Apple are also part of this community
- Clients:
- The “Ribbon”-based new UI is extensible programmatically
- Application-level add-ins
- All in .NET managed code
- Servers:
- Sharepoint-based: new focus on collaboration
- IE-based solutions, particularly InfoPath DHTML rendering stuff
- Content Management Server is integrated into Sharepoint
- Workflow integration
- Tools:
- For every skill level
- For Power users: Sharepoint, Excel
- For Designers & Analysts: Sharepoint Designer, Access & Excel
- For Developers: Visual Studio 2005
- By the way, the Visual Studio Tools for Office v3 CTP will be handed to us as an exclusivity…!
After that, there was a demo showing the following:
- Integration of
- Sharepoint
- Workflow
- Web-based InfoPath forms
- New Office documents are zipped files with XML content inside:
- Data binding defined inside the documents
- Similar idea to Apple bundles…
- “Ribbon” toolbars
- Fully extensible, you can add your own
- Defined using XML files
- Taskpanes
- Easier creation
- You can create them with Visual Studio 2005
- Excel Services
- The whole power of Excel, into a server product!
- Create applications and user-defined functions in Excel files, deploy them to a server and consume them using any other application. For example from a live-updateable Word document…
Question and answers: at the end of the keynote, Bill answered some questions and these are some of them:
- What about WinFX in Windows Vista? It seems that in current beta builds WinFX is not nor installed neither activated; the reason is a “performance problem”, and in the final build it will be installed and enabled by default.
- What will be the impact of “Ribbon”, the new UI in Office 2007? Well they just do not know; they are confident that users will get used to a significant UI change, that is, a complete redesign of the toolbars and menus of the applications in the Office suite… The time of adaptation should go from 20 minutes to one week… (?)
- What about backwards file format compatibility? Office 2007 will provide import / export capabilities, and also, Office 2007 applications will co-exist pacifically with older versions of Office (well, all but Outlook, that historically never accepted more than one version of it in the same machine… This won’t change with the new version, actually)
OK, there’s much more but the next session is about to begin and I don’t want to miss it! More about the conference in the next postings…. :)
NB: the complete webcast of the keynote is available here, and the complete transcript text is available here.
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