LONDON -- Microsoft is announcing the release of a technical beta of the next major upgrade to its Office productivity suite, code-named Office 12.
The release will go to a maximum of 10,000 customer and partners, said Eric Brown, director of central marketing for Microsoft's Information Worker EMEA unit, speaking at a conference here this week. Different customers will do different levels of testing and deployment, Brown said. Office 12 will go to a broad public beta next spring, the company said.
"It's certainly the case that we will expect these customers to get real experience with the product," Brown said. "It will be serious testing as opposed to having a look under the dashboard."
New Features
Office 12 will include applications such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher, Project, and Visio.
Microsoft has made major investments in the user interface and changed it significantly, Brown said. Microsoft has also worked extensively on enterprise content management, workflow processes and tools to enhance collaborative work, he said.
Jeff Raikes, president of the company's Business Division, said Office 12 has many examples of ways to "seamlessly" move in between applications and functions. Also added are business intelligence functions allowing for simpler creation of data and the sharing of that data with other employees via servers, he said in an interview with the IDG News Service.
Preview Offered
Some of Office 12's new features were demonstrated by Raikes on Wednesday at the IT Forum in Barcelona. One feature allows for what are termed calendar overlays, where an executive can see a personal calendar in the Outlook e-mail program and then overlay that with organization calendars on the network.
Outlooks can also be modified to allow for a combination of structured information with "unstructured" information, Raikes said. For example, updates to blog pages done by company employees can be fed by Really Simple Syndication (RSS) into Outlook.
Documents created in Office 12 will use Extensible Markup Language (XML) formatting by default, supporting Microsoft's moves toward the standard for Web-based services and sharing of information.
It's too early for pricing information, and Brown said it will be determined later based in part on customer feedback.
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