Microsoft gambles with New Office 2007 interface 23 May, 2006 By Paul Weinberg

This week, Microsoft lifted a non-disclosure agreement on its early May presentations in New York City and San Francisco regarding the beta two version of Office 2007, slated to be on sale this coming January.

"This is the first time in a long time that people have actually said yes, I could really use this, I want it right now," stated Warren Shiau, the lead analyst in IT research at Strategic Council. "Everything that I have seen [in Office 2007] allows the user to do a lot more."

However, Amy Wohl, the author of Amy Wohl's Opinions wonders about the reaction of corporate clients to the training and help desk costs involved with Office applications under a radically altered user interface.

She said that Microsoft might have saved itself the trouble if it had talked to critics as well as the converted during its comprehensive customer surveys.

"You are not talking to people who really have a lot of disagreements with you about your business practices or the products."

Wohl added that corporate customers will take into account that users will typically only use less than 10 per cent of a major software application.

Users will observe in Office 2007 the removal of the task bar and the button bar and their replacement with a new paradigm that Microsoft has dubbed "the ribbon."

Office 2007 is a much more visual experience as it offers the user within a particular context the ability to establish a graphical preview before the changes are made to a document, explains Mike Silver, research director for hardware and operating systems at Gartner.

Microsoft has gone this route for one basic reason, Silver continues.

"Eighty per cent of the features people put on their wish list were already in the product. "They just couldn't find it."

Silver agrees that in the short run the steps that Microsoft has taken are "risky." The company, for instance, has made it impossible for users to switch to an earlier, more classic version of the interface while they are in Office 2007.

"Microsoft's take on it is that in the long term though, the interface exposes features better than the old one, and that helps to lower help desk costs and training costs because things are more discoverable, and people don't have to call for help as much. Certainly, that is something that is going to take a little time to see if that bears out."

Silver does not think it will be a challenge for users to jump earlier versions of Office to adopt the upcoming product.

Based on Gartner interviews with large and medium sized enterprises at its conferences from across North America about 30 of installed desktops still use Office 2000, while another 40 per cent are working with Office 2003.

However, all three analysts interviewed are all enthusiastic about the look and feel of the output that comes with Office 2007, including the new animation features in Power Point.

"For Word, Excel and Power Point, they allow you to create really beautiful output without having to understand how to create that by yourself. Microsoft has figured out correctly that users don't have a clue how to do that. It is just too complicated; they have created these professionally designed formats," stated Wohl.

Silver also sees corporate users becoming excited by the availability of larger spreadsheets in Excel in Office 2007, as well a new pre-deployment testing tools.

For the first time users will be able to conduct tests and eliminate problems that might exist between existing applications and document files and the new Office 2007 within the enterprise. "This will help you [figure out] which documents are going to have issues, proactively, instead of after the fact [following the installation of a new version of Office]," he added.