I've participated in every beta of Office and Windows since 1995... a few before that, and now Office 14 is apparently right around the corner.
Since Beta code isn't yet out... I've included a couple of charts showing some of the direction that will be taken. These types of charts are very typical of MS's development process; I've seen similar charts for every release of Office for many years.
I'm looking forward to beta testing Office 14. As before on this site, when it's legally allowed I'll post images and impressions (I at one point had posts of over 500 images of Office 12 and Vista when they were in beta, organized as a "tour"). The Ribbon was the big change for Office 2007 and it is an example of Microsoft at it's absolutely very best.
If you're not familiar with the Office Ribbon ("Fluid UI"), watch this humorour video: mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msnse/0604/27723/o12_ep2_comp_MBR.wmv
What would I like to see in the product? Here are a few examples:
- The Ribbon interface across the board. And not only in the core Office products, but in the related products such as Streets & Trips (which without the Ribbon is nearly impossible to use - in fact outright dangerous - when in the car alone) and of course Expression Web.
- A single options pane for all the Office product basic options (compatibility, save, recovery, print, etc). I would use this to set the file types for compatibility (aka former office formats such as .doc versus .docx). The new formats are causing all sorts of trouble in companies (and customers) which mix releases of Office.
- Bring back the Office Binder. I use all kinds of documents to present a point about a single topic; I need a better way to organize them together.
- Lets get SharePoint and LiveMeeting better integrated. They're the superior products in the marketplace, more people should know about them. But their integration into Outlook, for example, looks tacked-on and uncoordinated.
- OneNote *rules*. I use it for everything and almost never use paper anymore. The advantages of being able to search for anything I've ever entered into OneNote makes OneNote and the Office System the killer application for me. I'd expect to see the Ribbon interface for OneNote. OneNote is probably Microsoft's leading productivity application at the moment and it should be kept to an absolute state-of-the-art product cycle. There are a couple of things happening in Microsoft Research which shold be integrated into OneNote as well (such as InkSeine). IMHO, OneNote seems to have fallen slightly behind the curve in the Office System... when it should be leading-edge. In fact, Onenote new releases should be on a yearly cycle to showcase Microsoft talents and innovation.
- Organization... and this thought is not yet fully formed. I have over a million files on my system... to keep my user files organized I keep the notebook structure in OneNote roughly the same hierachy as Outlook and as My Documents. Files in each area are closely related to each other, but I have to look into 3 different areas to find all related files. Question: could the exact same hierarchy be duplicated in each place? And for the longer term, why not the store the same topics in the same place, regardless of which file format or tool they were created from? This has to be something in the file system... it doesn't yet need to extend into the server (and conversely, a server such as SharePoint should not be used to create this functionality - I need to carry everything with me on my laptop). This is something Microsoft Research needs to look at in the longer term... I know some thinking has gone on into this type of organization as far back as ten years ago.
I will absolutely admit it, I miss being a Microsoft employee. When I was in Redmond, an internal share provided daily or weekly builds of every single product of the company. My laptop always had the most recent builds of the upcoming releases of Office and Windows at all times. No pain, no glory: sometimes in the very early cycles the build wasn't workable but at least I gained experience and sent feedback whenever possible. I have no idea if this is done anymore... and certain jerks probably ruined it by privately (and unauthorized) releasing code to the public which is almost always misinterpretted by people that don't understand how the development process works.
These days, I have to rely on MSDN and Connect to get beta code... and those are inconsistent and are almost always frustratingly out of sync with the development cycle and each other. IMHO, MS needs to fix this before betas begin. When the next Office and Windows beta code (or even Alpha, as I did with Vista) becomes available, I'll again build a brand-new and dedicated PC specifically to test them on... and as before I'll also run them on my regular-use systems when appropriate.
