Beyond Binary

With Windows 7 having been finalized, I realized that my main work set-up was utterly lacking in the unfinished software department.

Clearly, that couldn't stand. So, last week, I installed the technical preview of Office 2010 on the Windows 7 machine I have been using every day. For the foreseeable future, I'll be trying to see how the new applications stack up in handling my day-to-day work.

As for my early impression, I think my colleague Rafe Needleman said it best in a tweet he wrote earlier this week, while tying out the new Office.

"I wish Outlook/Office 2010 tech preview would do something weird and dumb so I could write about it. Sadly, it just works."

Microsoft has a tradition of internal testing of its products, which it dubs "dogfooding." Here at Beyond Binary, we like to do a bit of dogfooding ourselves, despite the fact we have two cats and no canines.

Although I have installed all of the main Office applications--Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote, I really only use Word and Outlook on a daily basis.

The most noticeable change for me is in Outlook, particularly its new conversation threading feature. Although the concept is familiar to anyone who has used Gmail, it is quite powerful to see the notion applied to the hundreds of e-mail messages that land in my in-box on any given day.

I have a few minor quibbles. Office 2010 is good at bunching together e-mails even if the subject line changes, but its grouping has some false positives in joining disparate conversations just because the subject lines are the same. For instance, it tends to put all of my messages with the subject "Hey there" together, even though that's a standard subject line for me. Similarly, it puts all of my "(no subject)" e-mails together.

That said, I really like the feature overall. It definitely saves me time and makes finding those earlier messages in a thread much simpler.

On the Word front, there are features I am interested in trying out, but few that I have noticed in my casual use. Of course, my use of Word is somewhat atypical. I basically am only looking for a text editor with really good save capabilities. The first thing I do is turn off the smart quotes, hyperlinking, autocorrect, and all of the other features that help distinguish Word from, say, WordPad.

I wrote earlier about one feature I am excited about--paste preview--which helps one see what the different paste options will look like before you commit. That's helpful because usually what I want is the "paste unformatted" option (see above section where what I really need is a text editor), but every now and then I am looking to preserve more of the formatting and it is nice to see what I will get ahead of time.

As a photo nerd, I am also keen on playing around with the artistic effects that Microsoft added to Word. In the past, I needed Photoshop, or at least a program like Photoshop Elements, to do things like turn a photo into a watercolor painting. But now one can do that straight from Word.

Let's see, what else? I'm not a huge fan of the Ribbon, but given that it is here to stay, it is nice to see it has made its way into all of Outlook, as well as to OneNote.

Microsoft Office 2010 technical preview (screenshots)

I'm more fond of the Backstage view, which is new to Office 2010. Essentially a replacement for the file menu, the backstage view offers a more contextual and visual way to do tasks like opening recent documents, creating new ones or printing the document you are working in.

But the thing that I am most interested in, the browser-based versions of Office, I will have to wait a little bit longer for. Although Microsoft released the technical preview of the desktop versions in July, we're still waiting on the Web apps. The official word is they should be out in test form "later this summer."

If I were Microsoft, I'd work to get a Web-based Office out there pronto.

The fact that many customers are shifting from running their own e-mail servers to getting mail as a hosted service doesn't have to spell doom for Microsoft, insists Rajesh Jha, the man who heads the Exchange business.

In an interview on Monday, Jha said that, although many see the rise of services as more of a benefit to companies like Google, he sees it as an opportunity for his business.

Microsoft's Rajesh Jha, shown here in his office earlier this year, says the shift from a world of servers to a world of services need not spell trouble for the Exchange business.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

"I feel we will grow our share overall with the move to services," Jha said. In particular, Jha said that Microsoft has a better option for small and midsize businesses than it did when its only option was for those companies to run their own Exchange servers. "I think we have a huge opportunity for growth. I don't think we are in a defensive position at all."

In a year in which many software businesses--including a number within Microsoft--took a hit, the Exchange business continued to grow last year, Jha said, saying that revenue for the product nearly hit $2 billion and has 70 percent market share among corporate users.

Jha acknowledged, though, that competition for the in-box is definitely heating up.

"It is where people spend more of their hours," Jha said. "It's become a real critical part of the day. Our competitors are smart. They see it too."

In addition to Google, IBM continues to push its Lotus Domino/Notes combination while Cisco has said it will have a Linux-based e-mail offering based on last year's Postpath acquisition.

Sounding a familiar refrain, Jha said that he expects customers to warm to Microsoft's strategy, which lets them have the option of running Exchange themselves or purchasing it as a subscription hosted service.

"With Exchange, we don't give them any kind of technology ultimatum," Jha said. "We don't say 'Thou shalt move to the cloud.' "

Microsoft has shifted its priorities, though. Unlike past versions of Exchange, Microsoft developed Exchange 2010 as a service first, and only later has it done the work on the server product. That server product, which has been in testing for some time and reached the beta stage in April, is now ready in a near-final "release candidate" form.

Among its features is one that lets users "mute" an e-mail thread that they are no longer interested in being part of.

Jha reiterated that the final version of Exchange 2010 should be done later this year.

"I feel pretty good about how we are tracking," he said, noting that half of Microsoft's in-boxes--some 80,000--are now on the new version of Exchange. " We'll definitely be ready this year."

Microsoft is expected on Wednesday to announce a partnership with European mobile giant Nokia to help get its Office software onto that company's mobile phones, CNET News has learned.

With the next version of Office, Microsoft is trying to expand its desktop hold on the productivity market into one that spans the PC, Web, and phone, and this deal is seen as a significant move in that last category.

The software maker has already said that, with the next version of Office, it plans to offer browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Those programs will be able to run inside Safari and Firefox in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That means that Office, for the first time, will run on Linux-based machines.

On the phone side, Microsoft has shown the ability for Office 2010 documents to be displayed on a variety of mobile phones. So far, the only phones that have their own native versions of Office have been those running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software.

Microsoft is looking for ways to strengthen its Office franchise into one that maintains its relevance and market share even as the PC becomes just one of many devices people use to access their information. Office is also vital to Microsoft's fiscal health, with much of the company's profits still coming from Windows and Office.

Microsoft released a technology preview of the PC-based Office 2010 applications in July, although it has yet to start publicly testing the browser-based versions. The final version of Office 2010 is due next year.

Although Nokia and Microsoft have long been rivals in the phone business, the two have also struck deals at times. Nokia already has a license that allows its phones to connect to Exchange Servers using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol. In 2007, Microsoft also struck a deal with Nokia to have Windows Live services run on the Finnish company's phones.

The deal comes even as Microsoft is trying to figure out how to keep its Windows Mobile operating system in the game amid stiff competition from Nokia in Europe as well as Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and an emerging threat from devices running Google's Android operating system.

Expanding Office to other mobile devices may help that business, but at the same time takes away one of the areas where Windows Mobile had a leg up on rivals--its direct compatibility with Office.

Update: The two sides aren't talking details, but they have confirmed a press conference on Wednesday to discuss an alliance. It will start at 8 a.m. PT and CNET will have live coverage.

Also, as TechFlash's Todd Bishop points out, Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has scheduled an announcement for Thursday. Do you think we'll see Office for the iPhone this week?

As noted by blogger Long Zheng, Microsoft has snapped up the Office.com domain.

The address would seem to make for a logical home for the forthcoming Web-based version of Office, though Microsoft declined to say how it plans to use the address.

"At this point it's too early to share details on our plans around www.office.com," a Microsoft representative said on Thursday. Microsoft launched a technical preview of Office 2010 last month, but the Web-based versions aren't slated to start public testing until later this year. Microsoft has said that the browser-based Office Web Applications will be a free part of the Windows Live service and will work with Safari and Firefox, in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

As for Office.com, Microsoft appears to have acquired the domain from ContactOffice, which has its own Web-based suite of tools. As of Thursday morning, a message on the Office.com site warns users that they are being moved to the ContactOffice.com domain.

"As you know from the recent email we sent you, we will be transitioning the operation of your Virtual Office account to ContactOffice.com during the next 30 days," reads the current message on the site. "As part of this transition, on Monday, June 29, 2009, we changed email addresses in the office.com domain to ones in the contactoffice.com domain."

Microsoft declined to offer any details about its acquisition of the Office.com domain. A representative of ContactOffice did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Update: Robin Wauters at TechCrunch notes that the Office.com site wasn't owned by ContactOffice itself, but operated under a revenue-sharing agreement with the U.S.-based owner of the site.

(Credit: CNET News)

The next version of Office moved a step closer to reality on Monday as Microsoft released an invitation-only technical preview of Office 2010.

However, the release of the software will be limited. Attendees of this week's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, as well as the recent TechEd show, will gain access to the desktop versions of Office 2010. Microsoft has also been taking sign-ups via its Office 2010: The Movie teaser Web site.

Also, it won't show off the program's biggest change--the addition of browser-based versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote.

Those so-called Office Web Applications are being demonstrated on Monday, but the technical preview of the Web apps won't come until later this year. For consumers, Microsoft plans to make the browser-based versions a free part of Windows Live next year, but hasn't decided whether they will include advertising.

The applications, which run in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, are aimed at both expanding the number of Office users within businesses as well as holding the ground threatened by Google Docs and other Web-based productivity programs.

On the desktop side, Microsoft plans a broader beta of the software later this year, with a final release in the first half of 2010.

Much of what is in the technical preview of Office 2010 is not a shocker, given that a test version of the software leaked onto the Web earlier this year, although Microsoft is offering further details on what's in the product as well as how it plans to sell the new software.

In its last update to Office--Office 2007--Microsoft introduced entirely new XML file formats and a to use a "ribbon" that shifts commands based on what the user is doing. Office 2010 is a set of less jarring changes, with Microsoft saying the goal was to make the basics better.

Office 2010 sticks with the ribbon motif, expanding it to include many of the Office components that didn't get the interface the last time around. Office 2010 will also come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions--a first for Office.

Word gets a collection of cool image effects that stem from the DaVinci Imaging Engine that was part of Microsoft's now-discontinued Digital Image Suite product. Word, as well as the other programs, gets a new "paste preview" tool that lets users hover over different paste options and see what their paste will look like before accepting that selection.

Excel gets a new feature called Sparklines, which are tiny graphs that can fit in a single cell of a spreadsheet. PowerPoint picks up video editing features as well as the ability to create a video of one's presentation, including voice annotations.

The Outlook e-mail and calendar program adds a conversation view feature, a la Gmail. Microsoft's feature goes further though, offering an "ignore thread" option which keeps a user from having to see a message string they are no longer interested in being a part of. It also has a "MailTips" feature that offers etiquette and security alerts before doing things as replying to a large group or sending a document outside the firewall.

To handle file tasks like saving and printing across Office, Microsoft has added a "backstage view" to each of the applications. It has also made it possible for multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously through co-authoring tools.

Microsoft is also simplifying the number of different Office bundles it sells. There will be three consumer versions. Office Home and Student comes with OneNote, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Office Home and Business adds Outlook to the mix, while Office Professional includes all that, plus the Access database and Publisher page-layout programs.

On the business side, Microsoft Office Standard, the standard package for volume licensing customers, includes Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, OneNote, and Publisher, with the last two applications being new additions to that edition. Licensing Office Standard also gives businesses the ability to host the browser-based versions of the software. The Professional Plus version adds Access, InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove), and the Microsoft Communicator instant-messaging program.

Microsoft has yet to announce pricing for any of the products.

Microsoft Office 2010 technical preview (screenshots)

In Office 2010, Microsoft is hoping to cut down on the need for the undo button by introducing the ability to preview different paste options before committing to one.

(Credit: Microsoft)

It stands to reason that one of the most common tasks users do in Office is copy and paste something into a document. In fact, Microsoft says about 20 percent of Office command clicks are either copy or paste.

But, it also turns out that one of the most common things users do after pasting something is to hit the "undo" button after finding out that they didn't get what they were looking for.

"You shouldn't have to do that," said Microsoft group product manager Chris Bryant. "We should give you better tools."

With Office 2010, Microsoft is introducing a paste preview command that lets a user see what the different paste options will look like before having to commit.

Today, the software maker provides a number of different paste options, such as including text with all the HTML formatting intact or just pasting the unformatted text. Users can even change the default to be whichever option they think they prefer the most. The problem is that there is no one option that is universally preferred and even the same user wants one format one time and a different option the next.

Microsoft is hoping the paste preview option will help solve that problem. It is also counting on that that and other new features will add up to make Office 2010 a compelling upgrade even though it is not the major overhaul seen with the last release, Office 2007. Microsoft is making an invitation-only technical preview of the software available on Monday, with a broader beta release planned for later in the year, to be followed by a final version in the first half of 2010.

"If you look at the number of times people cut and paste and then undo, it's remarkable," Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said in an interview last week. "Personally I'm a victim of that, as well."

Elop said that paste preview is changing his muscle memory away from his pattern of "paste, oops, undo."

Stephen Elop is convinced that even in a world of free, browser-based productivity software, consumers and businesses will continue to pay for Office.

Microsoft will bow to reality with Office 2010, adding browser-based versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote. But, in an interview this week, the head of Microsoft's Business Division says that there is still plenty of life in the full version.

"At the highest level, what we're able to put forward to our customers is not just the best productivity experience, but one that spans the PC, the browser environment, the Web environment, services, and so forth, and the mobile device," Elop said. "So, it's the best productivity experience across the PC, the mobile phone, and the browser."

At its worldwide Partner Conference on Monday, Microsoft will give people a feel for how this works and is expected to start broader testing of the first piece--the desktop applications.

Elop

(Credit: Microsoft)

As for Google, Elop said that most businesses still think of Google as a search company or are just kicking the tires on Google Docs. He shrugged off the fact that Google this week brought the products out of beta.

"I've heard that the word was dropped," Elop said. "I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name."

He also said it is too soon to have an opinion on Google's just-announced Chrome OS.

"We haven't seen it," he said. "We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog."

In a wide-ranging interview, Elop shared more views on Google as well as his perspectives on Office, business software, and the broader economy.

What are customers asking for from Office? What's the most common thing that large businesses ask you for when you're talking to them about Office?
Elop: You know, when you boil it all down, everything we do essentially in the division, when you're with a CEO or a CIO or whatever the case may be, the base conversation is about productivity. It's about how can you help me solve this problem, and that problem often is about the productivity of some aspect of their business, of something they're trying to achieve competitively, or whatever.

Certainly in today's economic setting, cost savings comes into it. How can you help me save money in getting what we need to get done? How can you help me solve these problems, but do so in a more cost-effective way?

You mentioned cost savings. How is the business environment relative to investment in software and other technology compared to, say, when we spoke in February?
Elop: You know, when we spoke in February, I think there were a lot of people who didn't know what was going on.

I think people may not agree as to what's going on in the economy right now. Everyone has different opinions. But at this point people have opinions. And because people have opinions about what's going on in their business or their part of the economy, on that basis they begin to make plans. The plans will be different than the plans they might have had six or nine months ago, but they can actually establish a plan, and therefore a budget, and decide, OK, in our business we're going to do this, we're going to invest in these ways, and so forth. I don't want to say there's increased confidence as much as there is less ambiguity in people's minds. They've decided what it means to them.

Now, at Microsoft, you've heard Steve (Ballmer) talk a number of times about how we view what's happened as being a reset in the economy, that it's not a bounce back to the way things were, but things have reset, and things need to stabilize here even more, and then we'll see things begin to grow as increases in productivity in the economy kick in.

The product lineup that you guys are going to have going into next year, what does that add to your arsenal, particularly Office 2010?
Elop: I think at the highest level, what we're able to put forward to our customers is (not) just the best productivity experience, but one that spans the PC, the browser environment, the Web environment, services, and so forth, and the mobile device.

When people look at Office 2010 in the broadest sense, and that's both the client applications, it's the services offerings, it's the server products, it's the Web applications, all of those pieces together. Certainly what customers are recognizing as they've had pre-briefings and the early experimentation with the products is that we're at some form of generational shift into this world of software plus services, and Office 2010, I think, is surprising people as it relates to the extent to which we've fully embraced software plus services.

How do you see the balance of Web applications and desktop programs? You guys have obviously talked about it's not just about putting Office in the browser. What are the kinds of things that you think are best done via the browser, what are the things that are best done in a desktop program, and how does that inform sort of the way you guys have designed those two products?
Elop: First of all, it's helpful to look at specific scenarios. I'll just use a personal example. I was at my parents' home recently, I needed to edit a document, I hadn't carted my PC around with me. I had my father's PC connected to the Internet. I was able to use a Web application to quickly look at a document, make some lightweight changes, and pass that document along without interrupting the fidelity of the document, being a part of the collaborative experience with others at Microsoft. There's a specific scenario where the Web application played an important role.

Similarly, if you look in the mobile environment, there are scenarios related to, for example, taking a picture as part of some work that you're doing. You're unlikely to take a picture with a Web browser, or a notebook computer.

The second part of the answer, though, is that while there are specific scenarios that are best advantaged within each of the different ways of delivering our technology, the best experience comes from the combination of all of those things. So, we think less about the Web applications as standalone word processor things, and far more about it as a complement to the trio of the phone, the PC, and the browser environment. We think about the best experience being the sum of those things working well together.

Your preference, and certainly the way you guys are investing in the Web applications, is as an adjunct to the desktop, not a replacement. That said, how common do you think it will be that businesses license just the Web applications for at least a portion of their employees?
Elop: Well, we hope that it's very common to the extent that there are, let's say, workers in a business (where) today a company has said, look, there's one PC for 100 employees on a shop floor, or something like that. To the extent that they now license those workers for a lightweight browser experience in some way, shape, or form, and they're now part of the Office family, that's a positive thing for us. It brings them into the whole environment of productivity that we're trying to deliver.

So, those scenarios we think will be relatively common. It could be factory floor workers, it could be retail employees, and outlets around the world, and there are all sorts of scenarios that we think have been under-served from participating in the productivity experiences that some of these applications will serve to support.

I guess the other piece of that question is whether you expect that there will be a portion of customers that attempt to move some part of their workforce that has access to desktop Office to just browser-based versions?
Elop: I mean, by definition there will be some. Do I think it's a huge proportion? No, I don't. And the reason for that is because, particularly in that we're talking about the commercial setting, where we believe that the productivity experiences that we deliver in the rich client applications, with the Web applications as a complement to that, is still going to be a compelling experience that people are going to be saying, hey, I want people participating, for example, in collaborative editing of documents, in collaborative sharing of PowerPoint presentations, as examples.

For example, our multi-user authoring feature. There are examples like that which we believe represent improvements in productivity for these customers that are delivered through the rich client application. So while you'll always be able to point to some examples of someone somewhere making that decision, we don't believe that's going to be the dominating force.

How often do customers bring up Google apps in meetings, and is it usually when you're talking about the product, or when you're talking about price?
Elop: Customers are aware of Google in different ways. Sometimes just from a search perspective, sometimes they're aware of things like Google Docs and so forth. And our experience is it may lead to a discussion around what is software plus services, what is Microsoft's view on it. And the tendency is not, obviously in our conversation, to dwell on their price versus our price, or things like that, because it's two very, very different things.

When you put side by side, for example, the full range of on-premise and in the cloud services like Exchange, SharePoint, (Office Communications Server), and so forth, the full range of rich client applications and soon Web applications and so forth, combined with many years of enterprise support, of an understanding of how we're going to take care of mission-critical capabilities, it's a whole different conversation. And so that's why in the context of a large-scale customer who is engaging these things I think there's tire kicking, or they may look at these things, but there's a clear understanding that... enterprises have some very specific and far-reaching requirements that Microsoft over many years has figured out how to deliver.

Well, they're out of beta now, is that a significant move?
Elop: I don't know. I've heard that the word was dropped, I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name. I couldn't interpret what it meant.

As someone who has been in this industry a long time, what do you make of Google's announcement that they're moving into the operating system realm with Chrome OS?
Elop: Well, let me just challenge the premise of your question. They've announced a couple of times now that they're moving into the operating system business, because there's the whole Android thing, and now there's Chrome.

We haven't seen it. We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog. So it's very hard for us to know, without seeing what they're doing, to comment on it.

You have architected part of Office 2010 to run in the browser-based Office Web apps. If I'm not mistaken Chrome isn't one of the supported browsers, but it might, in fact, work in Chrome. Do you guys see Chrome as an important browser to develop for?
Elop: It depends on how you define important. From a market share perspective Chrome is very low. So I think we're driven by customers on these things. There are other browsers that have greater market share, and that's where we've concentrated our first efforts.

I'm not sure "spell check this" has the same ring as "I'll be back," but I have enjoyed the series of promo videos for Office 2010 that try to cast the software as the plot of an action movie.

Microsoft has a series of videos pitching Office 2010 as if it were an action flick.

(Credit: CNET)

The latest installment shows the grave of Clippy, the oft-mocked help tool that has been absent from recent versions of the productivity software.

It also features an interrogation to find the missing font. However, the female captive will give up only that it is somewhere between "Arial" and "Wingdings." (I guess that rules out Zapf Chancery.)

Anyway, if you are into computer nerd fun like me, it's worth a watch.

For those who want more hard-core information on the next Office, you shouldn't have to wait too long. Microsoft has said it will have a technical preview of the software this month. The software maker says it is taking sign-ups for that invitation-only release on its Office 2010: The Movie Web site.

Microsoft has posted a teaser site for Office 2010, treating the next productivity suite like a forthcoming movie.

(Credit: CNET)

Much like studios do with movies that are still months from hitting the theaters, Microsoft is looking to generate some advance buzz for the next version of Office.

The company has posted a movie trailer that teases Office 2010 and last week added a "behind the scenes" video that pokes fun at recent leaks of the product onto the Internet (and the fact that some leaked versions also came with a virus).

The "actor" being interviewed on camera likens the leaked preview to him being seen without his make-up and with a virus all over his face.

Microsoft quietly launched the site in April and the company says it is getting lots of hits and sign-ups, though it isn't offering any numbers.

On the site is also a button to sign up for a technical preview of Office, which is slated to begin next month. For those who want an earlier peek, we posted a ZDNet Australia screenshot gallery that comes from the leaked version.

Screenshots: Office 2010 technical preview leaked

The final version of Office 2010 isn't due until next year. Among the major changes with Office 2010 is the fact that it will also come with a collection of browser-based Office Web Applications that let Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote run from within Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.