Thoughts on Microsoft Office 2006 Premium, Sep 6

The Information Worker division at Microsoft is contemplating the introduction of a new edition of Office, currently called Office Premium. If I was going to (a) put my own money on the table for this enhanced version and then (b) recommend to my customers that they should upgrade given my current stance, what would I want to see in-the-box?

• Visual Version History of Documents and Email Threads. Keeping track of who has the authoritative version of a document, who said what in response to someone else, and who has feedback that has not yet been incorporated into a document is a pain today. I've previously written about NextPage, a service that deals with the document side of the issue. Everyone that I've shown this to says "I use Track Changes today, but this adds more and valued capabilities" ... this method of visually navigating a specific document over its lifecycle, and extending it to show the evolution of an email thread, would make me pony up for Office Premium.


• Visual Mapping of Ideas into an Outline. I use mind mapping a lot, taking advantage of paper, Microsoft OneNote, and Mindjet MindManager X5 Pro. These enable me to create a visual map of what I am thinking about, and then turn those thoughts into a written document using Word or something similar. There is integration between MindManager and Word, enabling the branches of the mind map to form the basis of the outline of a new document in Word. I'd like to be able to view and work with a single document in both mind map form and linear text form, and swap seamlessly back and forth between both views. If I could do this in Office Premium, I'd pay up.


• GTD-Style Projects and Next Actions. Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac introduced the concept of "Project Center", as a way of organizing a set of tasks, email messages and documents around a specific project. Whilst I found that the set up of a new project involved too many steps for my liking, the concept is solid. Based on David Allen's Getting Things Done approach to work/life, I'd like to see the project idea introduced into Office Premium. I'd pay up.


• Real-Time One-to-One Document Sharing. As I noted in Pillar 3, there are many times in a day that people want to show their in-progress work to a work colleague. However, most people lack the ability to do so in real-time, and instead resort to emailing the documents here, there and everywhere. I'd like to see the inclusion of real-time document sharing with the ability to switch control between the parties as an integral part of Office Premium. Make it free for one-to-one sharing, and link it to Live Meeting for larger groups. If this was included, I'd pay up.


• Sharing a Collection of Documents with Others. Users need the ability to share a collection of documents with other people, without having to resort to emailing copies to everyone. I'd like the ability to nominate a set of documents and email messages to share with a selected group of others. I don't necessarily want to be forced to put everything into a single folder, because at the moment I can't do that with documents and email messages. One way of doing it would be to include a "Share with Others" context option on a right-click, and then be able to add the item to a collection, or to create a new collection. At any time, I could view the items included in the collection in a single place, via a search-and-display approach. Finally, I'd like to be able to graphically demonstrate the interlinkages between the documents and email messages, thereby showing how the collection fits together. A flat list is a very dinosaur-style approach.

That's my top 5. Happy to discuss further with appropriate individuals.

What would you like to see? What would you be willing to pay for? I'm interested to hear your take. Please drop me an email, or even better, leave a comment below.

Comments

[mohamed]

good