As Promised, Microsoft Demos Next Versions of Vista, Office

Both packages expected to be available in second half of 2006.

Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

As expected, Microsoft chairman and chief architect Bill Gates introduced new features of the next versions of Microsoft Office and Windows in his keynote at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles today.

Gates's speech to kick off Microsoft's developer meeting included the first public demo of the forthcoming Microsoft Office, code-named Office 12. The demo, which showed off a newly designed user interface, was delivered by Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group. (For a full discussion of the new Office, read PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken's blog item "Microsoft Office 12's Radical New Look.")

Capossela also demonstrated new UI features of the latest build of Windows Vista, the next version of the Windows client operating system. Both Vista and Office are expected to be available in the second half of 2006. Microsoft also distributed the latest version of Vista to developers at the PDC Tuesday.

Building on a.Net Foundation

In his talk, Gates said that Microsoft has delivered on the promise it laid out at the PDC in 2000 to provide a Web services-based platform, .Net, that would allow business users to share files and data in a standard way through XML. "That was quite a proposition to put forth when Win32 was dominant," he said of the shift to an entirely new development platform.

Now that the.Net foundation has been laid, and the platform is being widely adopted, the next step for Microsoft is to more closely integrate the features of the applications within Windows and Office to allow the sharing of files and information across an enterprise as seamlessly as possible, Gates said.

This experience will come in part by giving users a more visual presentation of the data and tasks they need to accomplish, he said.

"We need to make it easy for people to visualize information that comes from any location," Gates said.

Finding Features

Microsoft is adding new features to both Windows and Office to bring information stored in the applications, as well as those applications' tools, as close to the surface as possible, he said.

To demonstrate this, Capossela highlighted interface features of Office that make it easier for users to tap into features they may not know exist because they were not easily accessible in previous versions.

"When we asked people what would you like us to do in the next version of Office, nine times out of ten, people have named something that is already in the product," Capossela said. "In Office 12, we are making a much more innovative UI to help you get better results faster."

To bring those features to the forefront, Microsoft is providing a visual toolbar across the top of the various Office applications that allows users to easily point and click on features that were hidden in drop-down menus in previous versions of Office, Capossela said.

For instance, in Microsoft PowerPoint, users can simply click on an icon in the tool window to change text on a slide into graphics, and choose from various styles for those graphics. In Microsoft Word, users can preview how an entire document will look in a font by simply scrolling over one of the choices in the font menu. Word users also can easily add text boxes by clicking on an icon, and choosing from a gallery of different styles of boxes that will easily change the appearance of the document, he demonstrated.

Integration

Capossela also showed off how RSS (Real Simple Syndication) has been integrated not only throughout the various Office applications, but also in Windows Vista and in Microsoft Dynamics CRM so users can see and read information from the RSS feeds they have subscribed to without having to use a different application.

Dynamics CRM is the next version of Microsoft's CRM software, a release that is due out later this year. The company rebranded the product and the rest of its enterprise resource planning portfolio Dynamics last week at the Microsoft Business Summit.

Other features also will show up across various Microsoft applications to tie them together, Capossela said. The same search box that appears across the top of Internet Explorer 7, the next version of its Web browser in Windows Vista, appears in each component of Office to enable quick and easy full-text search of documents, he demonstrated.

Additionally, Windows Vista will have a series of UI enhancements that can deliver real-time data to users. A new feature called Windows Sidebar places a series of "gadgets" that provide RSS feeds, picture slide shows, and other types of information on the right side of the UI. A similar feature, called Widgets, already appears in Apple Computer's Mac OS X version 10.4, commonly known as Tiger.

Developers can build their own gadgets to add to Windows Sidebar, as well, Capossela said. More information about this feature can be found at Microsoftgadgets.com.

Other enhancements to the Vista interface demonstrated include 3D displays of the various application windows open on the desktop.