• Illustration: XML Editing in Word
• Sidebar: Steve Ballmer on Office Priorities

A mid-2003 release of Office will be designed to expand its role as a client for corporate data, a tool for team collaboration, and a platform for software development. Although the release of Office 11, as it is currently called, is a year away, Microsoft is already talking about the product because customers are making upgrade decisions now based on what they expect in the future. However the precise features of Office 11 will remain vague until a beta release ships later this year.

Early Discussion

Microsoft rarely discusses details of an Office release so far ahead of time. One factor influencing this atypical action is the company's new Software Assurance upgrade plan for volume license customers. Customers who have upgrade coverage under the plan (or under the older Upgrade Assurance program) will get the eventual Office 11 upgrade at no further cost. However, customers must buy coverage for their current Office licenses by July 31, 2002. Those who purchase new Office licenses after that date must buy Software Assurance at the same time. In effect, customers who buy Software Assurance coverage for Office must bet that Office 11 will prove a cost-effective upgrade when it ships. Microsoft hopes to convince them that's a good bet.

Another factor that coincided with Microsoft’s early discussion about the next version of Office was the June 2002 release of Sun Microsystems’ competing StarOffice, a far less expensive (US$76) suite of common desktop applications that claims compatibility with Microsoft Office.

A Client for Web Services

Office 11 will be promoted as a "smart client" for corporate applications, continuing a campaign that began with Office 2000. Positioning Office as a client is aimed in part at fending off the growth of the ubiquitous browser and other "thin clients." Unlike these competitors, Office can perform much more complex, ad hoc analysis of data. It also taps the power of the PC’s CPU, rather than burdening a server, and works even when disconnected from the network. (For information on earlier efforts in this direction, see "Office Becoming Client for .NET" on page 21 of the Aug. 2001 Update.)

A particular focus in Office 11 is manipulating XML data from Web services, applications that communicate with the outside world by sending messages in XML formats over standard Internet protocols. For example, a clerk at a manufacturing firm might use Excel to retrieve sales numbers from a reseller's Web service, perform calculations based on internal formulas (such as profit and loss), and post the calculation in XML form to an internal Web service for measuring sales performance. (See "XML to Glue Applications Together" on page 8 of the Mar. 2002 Update.)

Screenshots from company presentations and a presentation at the June 2002 Fusion conference by Productivity and Business Services Group Vice President Jeff Raikes suggest that Word’s rudimentary XML editing capabilities will be significantly enhanced in Office 11. (See the illustration "XML Editing in Word".) Office 11 might make Excel and Access better Web service clients by enabling them to read and write any XML data, including data in XML formats supported by a particular Web service. Excel and Access 2002, in contrast, can only read and write XML data that conform to fixed XML schemas specific to those applications.

E-Mail and Group Work

Microsoft will also take several steps to improve Office for e-mail, team document authoring, and in-person meetings, continuing a focus on group work begun with Office 2000.

Most important, Microsoft says that it will fix the Outlook e-mail client’s inability to easily switch between online and offline modes, which is a key capability for laptops users, home users, and others who lack full-time network connections. Current versions of Outlook do not handle intermittent loss of network connections well, sometimes freezing or requiring a restart. Improving Outlook's online/offline behavior would likely require some form of client-side database replication analogous to the Local Store, which was planned for Outlook 2002, but canceled. (See "Microsoft Rethinks Exchange Storage Architecture" on page 3 of the May 2001 Update.)

The company also hopes to broaden use of SharePoint Team Services, its product for creating team Web sites for sharing documents, lists, and other data. That could mean adding Team Services to the core Office editions, such as Office Professional; it currently ships only in Office XP Developer Edition and with a few other applications, such as FrontPage. In Office 11, Team Services will also support the more scalable ASP.NET technology for dynamic Web pages. (See "SharePoint Goes .NET" on page 6 of the July 2002 Update.)

Finally, Office 11 will likely provide better support for use in meetings. For example, some Office applications could get a new application for note-taking and the ability to manipulate handwritten notes ("rich ink") on the Tablet PC.

Development Still VBA

Office will continue to ship with the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language and development environment introduced in Office 97 and updated with each successive release. In particular, it will not ship Visual Studio for Applications, a VBA-like embeddable development environment based on the new Visual Studio .NET development environment.

Sticking to VBA will be simpler for current Office solution developers, who might be reluctant to jump to the very different Visual Basic .NET language supported by Visual Studio .NET. However, it also means they won't get the benefits of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework run-time system, such as more reliable code, better virus protection, simpler deployment, and extensive code libraries and tools for accessing XML data and Web services. (For background, see the Feb. 2002 Research Report, "The .NET Development Platform.") Developers can use Visual Studio .NET to write code that uses Office functions (through the product's COM interoperability features), but Office 11 won't deliver anything specific to support this.

VBA will get small improvements to help developers build custom Web service clients on top of Office. The main one could be integration of the Office XML Web Services Toolkit into the VBA development environment. Developers must currently download and install this free toolkit separately.

Features, Packaging Not Set

Web services, collaboration, and development are all longtime goals for Office, and the company has yet to reveal what Office 11 will contribute to them compared to previous releases. For example, the company hasn't indicated specifically what features Office 11 will provide for working with XML documents and schemas, how it will improve Outlook's online/offline behavior, or whether VBA will include any features for XML development beyond what's already in free downloads.

Companies will likely get their first chance to find out what's new in Office 11 at the first beta of the product, probably in late 2002. That will be well after the July 31, 2002, deadline for customers to buy Software Assurance or Upgrade Advantage upgrade rights on Office 2000 or XP licenses they already own. In addition, Microsoft will likely not decide on Office 11 packaging until a few months prior to release. Packaging has become more important to evaluating products than formerly, because many recent products (e.g., Project 2002) deliver the bulk of their new features in Enterprise Editions that cost much more than past versions.