Office 12 as a Collaboration Vehicle, May 24

Microsoft has began to speak-up Office 12, the next version of its software suite for personal and team productivity, which is supposed to publicly ship in the second half of 2006. Given its challenge to prove the value of newer versions of Office to its collection of dinosaur users, Microsoft is planning a number of changes. I want to consider the collaboration capabilities in this Viewpoint.

Collaboration Capabilities
From a variety of reports about Office 12, here's the sense that I make of what is coming down the pike:

• The integration of presence and availability information is front-and-center, to display when other people and teams are available to communicate. Presence will come from Office Live Communications Server. As well as alerts by IM to signal a new communication opportunity, alerts will also be received from back-end processes and applications that require human intervention. Comment: Great, this is an important platform-level capability, and the wide use of it across end-user applications is the right direction.


• Bill Gates says that people will get five times as much email in four years as they do today. To aid in productivity, while someone is working on a task, new message alerts will be limited to those from specific people. Comment: Ok ... but ... they'll still have all of those messages to deal with. What can be done to reduce the number of email messages that are sent or received? Surely that's where the real productivity benefit comes from?


• Longhorn Server will include a new version of Windows SharePoint Services. It will include features from Groove Virtual Office, to enable employees at different companies to work together on projects. It may also include capabilities for tracking who contributed what to a document, a current limitation. Additional rapid application development tools may be offered to enable corporate developers to build and extend applications that specifically address client requirements. Finally, the integration with back-end processes sounds like Microsoft is moving in the direction that business process management vendors have been doing for a while, and that is making it possible to use a team workspace to resolve a specific issue. Comments: the Groove integration will be a show-stopper for some organizations, given that end users will be able to share a WSS site with people outside of the firewall with no control or monitoring options by IT. There are some significant risk factors there, but perhaps Microsoft will address those in coming months. Secondly, within the context of team collaboration, Bill writes that "Notes taken on a whiteboard will automatically be captured and emailed to participants" ... I thought the idea was to get collaboration to take place within a shared workspace, NOT within email. What gives?


• A new version of SharePoint Portal Server for Longhorn Server will be released. Microsoft is making a big push to get customers to abandon Exchange Public Folders, and use a Windows SharePoint Services site instead for combined document and email sharing, due to "the capability for check-in and check-out".


• Search will improve. Today Desktop Search and Web Search are two different things, but they will converge. Comment: They definitely need to, since a desktop search client will not find relevant information stored in a Web-based team workspace solution that the individual is a member of.

So thinking about the 7 Pillars model, what doesn't Microsoft address with its Office 12 vision? Pillar 4 for team-aware calendaring and scheduling is still a major failing. There is no mention of how it will address Pillar 6, the consolidation of action points and outstanding tasks across a Microsoft-aligned infrastructure. And finally there appears to be nothing about Pillar 7, the automatic discovery of collaboration opportunities. If these things are important within your environment, Office 12 isn't the road ahead for you.

Sources
For more information, have a look at these source documents:
"Update to lift sluggish Office", Australian IT
"Microsoft Office: What's On Tap", Line56
"SharePoint featured prominently in Office 12 plans", SearchExchange
"Gates Talks Up Office", CRN
"Gates does office vision thing", Computer Business Review Online
"Gates: Information trade key for businesses", ComputerWorld
"The New World of Work", Microsoft

What About You?
Will you be rushing to deploy Office 12 when it ships? What new feature most appeals to you, or what overlooked capability or feature do you think Microsoft has missed? Is the prospect of a forklift upgrade across a plethora of server products going to work for you, or will you be considering alternative approaches that enable the leveraging of existing desktop productivity tools? Please leave a comment below, or send me an email.

Comments

[Peter de Haas]

Michael,

Forrester also recently announced a new research article around this topic.

http://www.forrester.com/go?docid=37027&src=RSS
Haven't read it myself, but it could give you some new insights.
I will read up on you 'Pillars' to see if your conclusion are right. I assume they might be based on your current information. All I can say that it's most likely not yet the complete picture.

[Michael Sampson]

Peter, my position is indeed based on publicly announced information, of which there isn't much. So, yes, I'm looking forward to more indepth information, and on that I can build a final position.