Office Beta Released

Microsoft has released the first beta of the next version of Office, currently code-named Office 11, to a select group of beta testers. The next release of Office is intended to be a better client for XML Web services and for workgroup collaboration scenarios.

Focus on XML, Information Workers

Most products in the Office 11 suite have gained the ability to work with XML documents and user-defined schemas (which define the elements of an XML document, including whether they are required or optional and what type of data they must contain). Access, Excel, and Word, in particular, will be able to import and export XML documents while preserving the schemas and other crucial data. (Microsoft has also revealed plans for a new product in the Office family, XDocs, for working with forms and XML data, but it is likely to be shipped separately from Office 11.)

Microsoft is also positioning Office 11 as the core of its “information worker” strategy by adding new collaboration features and tying it closely to upcoming server releases, says Gytis Barzdukas, director of product management for Office. Workgroups will have new options for Office documents posted to intranet sites built with SharePoint Team Services (STS). For example, “you can take a list in an Excel spreadsheet and post it to a SharePoint site, where it will show up as a list, rather than a spreadsheet,” Barzdukas says. STS has shipped as a free add-on to certain versions of Office and FrontPage in the past, and an updated version will ship shortly after the release of Windows .NET Server release in 2003.