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Bullish on Office 2007

Maarten asks the $11.5 billion dollar question* – Why Office 2007? This is a question I’m interested in following as more and more people get exposed to Office 2007 beginning with beta 2. Personally, I'm more excited about this release than I was for the Office 97 release. As with Office 97, this release offers tons of new things for developers and end-users alike. Most importantly, the features have legs. To me, this release makes all releases since Office 97 feel like minor releases. Office 2007 is truly the next generation of Office (after Office 97).
Putting on my corporate finance hat for a second, I think there is definitely the potential for value creation with this release – definitely more so than any previous release. There, I said it. Go ahead – accuse me of drinking the kool-aid. :)

While personally I’m sold on the product, I think there is a significant segment of the user community that will have a hard time agreeing with me. There are always those who resist change and given the amount that has changed in Office 2007, these folks will be very vocal. On the one hand, I understand that many professionals are very busy and re-learning something represents a time investment when time is of short supply. On the other hand, real advancements in productivity cannot be made without change. It’s a matter of short-term costs versus longer-term benefits where the resistance to change stems from the risk that you may never recoup the short-term costs. Generally, I think the potential for value creation in this case, especially when viewed from a companywide perspective, makes this a risk worth taking.
 
So, why should Office 2007 be embraced? Off of the top of my head, here are a few things that stand out:

  1. It is simple to create professional looking documents. After awhile, “Plain vanilla” documents created with previous versions of Office will look so antiquated by comparison that companies/employees who create them will start to look second-rate.
  2. The integration between the core suite and Office SharePoint Servers took another huge leap forward. Big wins: Business Data Catalog, document libraries with user-defined content types, workflow, and Excel Services.
  3. XML file format. While I’ll follow the migration story closely, I think the developer potential around the XML file format is substantial, particularly for manipulating or creating Office documents on a server and for ISV’s looking for better ways to integrate their products with Microsoft Office (even if their product runs on different platforms).
  4. OK – this one probably doesn’t do much in terms of value creation and is purely subjective, but I love the new look. It doesn’t feel 10 years old anymore.

* annualized 2006 Microsoft Information Worker segment revenues using YTD results through 3rd Qtr

Posted: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 8:54 AM by hansen
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Comments

Anonymous said:

We've been hearing alot about how the look of documents is going to dramatically change now that Office 2007 makes it so much easier.

Do you really, honestly think though that the the look of corporate documents is going to change so dramaticly? I mean, really?

I manage 1300 Word templates which my organization uses. My users are more concerned with the wording of a document than how it looks...which is why we use templates - so the wording is the same from one document instance to the next.

I don't think my organization is unique in this. Just because Office 2007 has some nifty new UI features, organizations are not suddenly going to dramatically change the way their line-of-business documents look unless it actually serves the line of business to do so.

Just my $.02 on this particular marketing hype.
Darryl
# May 4, 2006 10:48 AM

hansen said:

Thanks for the perspective Darryl. Wow! You must have your hands full with all those templates!

To answer your question though, yes - I do believe the look will change dramatically. I think the reason Office documents looks so "blah" is because it takes a lot of effort and some know how to make them look nice. While you use a lot of templates to manage document content, many others use templates to manage document branding ("the look").

As a simple example of how the overall look of Office documents will improve, consider charts in Excel. The look of a default Excel chart and the color scheme has changed little in 10 years. Maybe it’s just me, but I think they look terrible. Yet so many people seem to stick with either the default or simple variations of the default. If you’ve ever done extensive chart formatting, you may agree – it’s a total pain in the butt. In Excel 2007 however, you can easily change chart types, color schemes, chart object layouts with point and click ease (and the preview feature – nice!). Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to my eye, charts created with previous versions of Excel aren’t in the same league as those created with Excel 2007.

You also raise another question though. Is it worth anything to have nicer looking documents? For some yes, for some no. I suppose it depends on who the ultimate audience of your document is and how image conscious your firm is.

Thanks again for your input Darryl – good luck with all of those templates! Out of curiosity – are you doing anything with VSTO? Are the XML file formats going to benefit you at all? Feel free to email me at shansen@officezealot.com if you’d like…
# May 4, 2006 12:18 PM
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