By Rob Helm [bio]
Posted: Jan. 22, 2007

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

The Office suite is the essential business tool for creating and editing documents and e-mail. The Office 2007 suite, released to businesses late in Nov. 2006, offers mainstream users better-looking documents with less work and makes major improvements to Excel for charting and large-scale calculation. However, Office 2007 also delivers the biggest changes to the product's user interface (UI) and technology since Office 2000. Thus, organizations will have to evaluate and test Office 2007 more carefully than they have tested previous Office versions, and many will want to roll out the product at the same time they deploy Windows Vista and new desktop computers.

Suite Improvements Without New Servers

Office 2007 has a different focus than Office 2003, the previous version of the suite. Office 2003 delivered few changes to the suite's applications other than the Outlook e-mail client. However, Office 2003 introduced many features for collaboration, document management, and business data access in conjunction with new server products, such as SharePoint Portal Server (now called SharePoint Server).

Office 2007 does improve collaboration and data access with Microsoft servers, particularly for the SharePoint products and SQL Server. However, it also delivers improvements for editing documents, analyzing data, working on e-mail, and all of the other core product functions. Of note are the following:

New UI speeds design. Office 2007 delivers a completely new UI, a toolbar-like "ribbon" that supports many more commands than the product's traditional menu system. Along with the suite's new templates and default styles, the new UI speeds formatting of documents, charts, and reports. Combined with the product's new features for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) export, Office 2007's formatting features will benefit users who need to produce "customer-ready" documents without help from graphics professionals. However, the new UI can require several weeks to learn thoroughly and will meet resistance from some expert Office users.

New file format opens Office documents. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 support new XML-based default file formats that are completely documented, in contrast to the proprietary binary formats that were the previous defaults. In the long term, the new formats will benefit developers of document management applications, records management systems, and other kinds of applications that need to examine or generate Office documents. However, organizations will have to plan for and deploy software to cope with the new formats, even if they do not deploy Office 2007 immediately.

Excel improvements for charting and large-scale calculations. While all of the Office 2007 applications have incremental improvements, the Excel spreadsheet and charting application delivers the most noticeable benefits. A completely rewritten charting feature provides better-looking results more quickly, while the product's larger spreadsheets and support for multithreaded calculation will pay off for large financial and engineering models. Excel 2007 also delivers improvements for analyzing SQL Server 2005 data and for sharing spreadsheets through SharePoint Server 2007, but Excel users will probably appreciate the improvements even without these new server products.

Time for a Desktop Refresh?

Office 2007 delivers the biggest technical changes to the suite since Office 2000. Although changes to the UI and the file format are perhaps most significant, organizations will also need to look carefully at application compatibility.

Office 2007 eliminates many features that Microsoft says were little-used and alters or removes some APIs used by macros and other add-ins. Consequently, organizations will have to test Office 2007 more carefully than previous versions for compatibility with existing macros and with third-party plug-ins for tasks such as document import/export, document management, and business intelligence. Microsoft has delivered tools for finding known compatibility problems in existing Office files, but organizations will need a systematic process for testing existing Office files and code with these tools.

As a result, many organizations will want to distribute Office 2007 in complete, tested computer configurations rather than upgrading Office on existing computers. The timing is auspicious: Office 2007 arrives at the same time as Windows Vista, which has prompted many organizations to begin planning for a PC refresh. In addition, customers using Windows 2000 (which occupies as much as a third of corporate desktops, according to Microsoft) in many cases face aging hardware and increasing support costs. Finally, Office 2007, like Windows Vista, has also made major improvements in its deployment technology and support for multilingual deployment, encouraging organizations to design new desktop and laptop configurations that will be easier to deploy and maintain.

In summary, organizations will want to consider the following advice for Office 2007 testing and evaluation:

• Evaluate Office 2007 as a desktop application, not just as a collaboration or data access client; unlike Office 2003, the product delivers many significant improvements even without a SharePoint or SQL Server upgrade
• Ensure that broad samples of users pilot-test the product to judge the impact of the new UI and missing features; expert Excel users are most likely to spot problems
• Deploy technology to deal with the new Office 2007 file formats as soon as possible, but also consider using the older binary formats as the default for new installations, to avoid compatibility problems with vendors and customers
• Count on more extensive compatibility testing than was necessary with Office XP or 2003; even commercial Office plug-ins from major vendors might be bitten by technical changes in the product.

Microsoft partners who have desktop deployment businesses, such as Unisys and Getronics, have begun offering pre-deployment evaluation and testing services for Office 2007 as well as Windows Vista. These services could prove more valuable for Office 2007 than for earlier versions, because of the significant technical changes in the product.

What's Ahead

This report provides a comprehensive introduction to evaluating Office 2007 and planning its deployment for CIOs and solution architects, in the following chapters:

"User Interface Speeds Formatting" identifies the major benefits of the UI and flags the most likely problems users will encounter with it.

"File Formats Improve Application Access, Require Planning" explains the benefits and risks of the new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats and outlines some tools and methods to mitigate problems created by the formats.

"Custom Code Moves to Office 2007" summarizes potential compatibility problems for macros and other kinds of Office add-ins and provides links to further information for developers.

"Office Suite Improves Deployment, Maintenance" explains Office improvements for initial installation and subsequent patching and updating, and notes the impact the new setup technology will have on Office 2007 deployment processes.

Subsequent chapters outline the improvements and potential compatibility issues in individual Office applications, focusing on Excel, Word, Outlook, Access, and InfoPath. The report also describes two applications, OneNote, and Groove, which are new to the Office suite. Finally, the report summarizes the suite's pricing, licensing, and system requirements.

Throughout, the report provides brief introductions to the suite's new features for document management and business data analysis with the SharePoint product line and the SQL Server business intelligence platform. However, this report focuses on the Office suite, not the other products in Microsoft's 2007 Office System product line. Future Directions reports will address other products and their integration with Office.

This report updates and combines previously published material in the Directions on Microsoft Update newsletter.