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."

Exchange 2010's conversation threading feature, as seen in a screenshot of Outlook Web Access.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The next version of Microsoft's corporate e-mail server will not only offer the ability to view e-mail by conversations, but also the option of "muting" any thread that a user would rather not take part in.

Conversation threading, a popular feature from Google's Gmail, and the mute option are several of the new features in Exchange 2010, the next version of the company's e-mail and calendar server. The software is entering public beta on Wednesday, with a final launch slated for the second half of this year.

Among the other features of the product, which has been code-named Exchange 14, is something Microsoft has dubbed "MailTips," which offers warnings when one might be about to commit an e-mail faux pas.

"MailTips is kind of like a guardian angel before you send the mail," Microsoft's Rajesh Jha said in an interview this week. For example, it will warn a user if they are about to send an e-mail to a large distribution list or if they are going to send an attachment outside their company's firewall.

Microsoft is also building in new archiving features into Exchange 2010, features that will allow companies to store a user's e-mail archive as well as make archived messages available to users when they are not at their desktop or laptop PC.

Many of Exchange 14's features work in the Web-based Outlook Web Access program, but to use them on the desktop will require Office 2010, which isn't due out until the first half of next year, Microsoft said.

"Exchange is leading the way," Jha said.

Microsoft is already using Exchange 2010 to power its Live@edu service for schools and universities. Customers of Exchange Online, Microsoft's hosted service for businesses, will have the option of moving to the new Exchange after the server software is released, Jha said.

For a bit more on Exchange 2010, here's a video I shot with Jha during an interview at his office earlier this year.

Microsoft said this week that it will start widespread testing of the next version of the Office suite sometime in the third quarter, in preparation for a final launch of the product in the first half of next year.

The product, which has been code-named Office 14, will be dubbed Office 2010 (as I predicted), with all of its related components also getting the 2010 moniker.

Microsoft first talked about the browser-based abilities of Office 2010 (then code-named Office 14) at a developer conference last October. Click image for full gallery.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft offered only limited details on the testing. In an interview, Office executive Rajesh Jha, who leads the Exchange team, said technology previews are more limited than public betas and typically go to hundreds of thousands more technical users as opposed to public betas, which go to millions of people and are something that "much more closely resembles a final release."

The schedule is not as ambitious as the one Microsoft laid out last October, which had called for a technology preview last year to be followed by a beta this year. Some very early testing of Office 14 did take place in 2008, but Microsoft confirmed earlier this year that the final version of Office 14 would not come until 2010.

Jha said that the technology preview will include both the traditional desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote as well as the browser-based "Office Web Apps" that Microsoft is building. The browser-based versions will be somewhat more limited than their desktop counterparts, but will include basic editing abilities, Microsoft has said. The software maker has also said the browser-based applications will run in Safari and Firefox, in addition to Internet Explorer, which will take Office onto both Linux computers and the iPhone.

"As you know, IT is being asked to do more with less and keep people more productive," Jha said. "With the next wave (of Office), we really wanted to address these challenges. Let's help people be more productive, whether it be from a PC, or a browser or a phone."

The roadmap for Office 2010 testing came as an aside within a Microsoft announcement that it will launch this week a public beta of Exchange 2010, the next version of its e-mail server. That product, part of the Office 14 wave of products, will ship this year, Microsoft said.

As noted earlier on Tuesday, Office 2010 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed that the next version of Office, code-named Office 14, will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

The 64-bit version is a first for both Office and for Microsoft's mainstream desktop applications, though a number of its server products, such as SQL Server, are already available in 64-bit versions.

Office 14, which is expected to be called Office 2010, is slated to ship next year. Among its other notable features is the fact that Microsoft will offer browser-based versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote, in addition to the traditional Windows-based desktop programs.

By extending the browser support to Firefox and Safari, in addition to Internet Explorer, Microsoft has said it will have the effect of also bringing Office to the iPhone and to Linux-based computers for the first time.

The existence of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions was noted on Tuesday by Ars Technica and in March by ZDNet blogger Ed Bott.

Software designed for a 32-bit processor can still run on a 64-bit machine, but likely, the 64-bit version of Office will have some performance advantages over its 32-bit sibling when running on a 64-bit machine.

Computers with 64-bit processors have been shipping for years, but it is only in the last year or so that most new PCs have started to be sold with a 64-bit operating system--required for running a 64-bit application.

While most desktop applications still run only in 32-bit mode, the server side has switched over more quickly. Some of Microsoft's server products, such as Exchange 2007 the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2, come only in the 64-bit variety.

The big selling point of 64-bit software is its ability to directly accommodate more than 4GB of physical memory.

REDMOND, Wash.--For a company that is happy to list a million reasons why Office is better than OpenOffice or Google Docs or other rivals, Microsoft sure is putting a tremendous amount of effort into working better with those products.

The next version of Office will natively support the OpenDocument format (as will the next service pack for Office 2007). As it is developing the next Office, Microsoft is also documenting every change it is making as part of its commitment to documenting all of Office's various formats and protocols.

"We often talk about the changing needs of the customers and our industry," said Antoine Leblond, who leads the Office engineering effort. "The one thing we don't talk about is how those needs have changed our engineering process."

Microsoft's Antoine Leblond, in his Redmond, Wash. office on a snowy day last week.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

Adding support for more standards and file formats may not be the biggest headline-grabber, but it is important to customers, Leblond said.

"This certainly is as important as any feature we would go do," he said.

Although Leblond said it was a lot of work to go back and document 25 years of the Word file format, he said the fact that his engineers now have to write down what they are doing can pay off in a number of areas, including security.

"Frankly, it's just good engineering," he said. "It actually has a lot of benefits."

Microsoft isn't just trying to work with its rivals, though. Much of the effort in Office 14, as with the past couple of releases is to also make Office work better with business processes. Some of that is efforts like Duet, which links to SAP, but it is also about helping businesses automatically generate and integrate Office documents as opposed to having Office documents live in their own world.

"What people are doing tends to be stand-alone," Leblond said. "What we hear people asking for all the time is (ways of) extending these into corporate processes."

It will take some time for the fruits of this work to come to market. Microsoft has already said not to expect Office 14 this year. Microsoft hasn't given a lot of detail on when it will come, although, in an interview this week, Chris Capossela said that Microsoft is hoping not to be too far outside the company's traditional three-year time frame between releases.

As for naming, Microsoft is expected to eventually call the product Office 2010, at least according to recent trends as well as a few slips of the tongue I heard during my time at Microsoft last week.

In addition to the standards work, Microsoft's big focus with Office 14 has been about adding the Office Web Applications that will let Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote run in a browser. With Office 14, Microsoft will also have updated versions of the Office apps for Windows Mobile although it will really be up to cell phone makers to decide when those come to market.

Options for mobile workers
The browser-based Web apps will also help take Office onto the iPhone. Over time, Leblond says Microsoft needs to work on even more types of phones. "We want every manner of cell phones to read Office documents," Leblond said. "That's an important thing. We don't live in this bubble."

Leblond said he understands adding more options for mobile workers is key to keeping Office relevant. "People aren't always sitting in front of their laptops or in front of their desks."

One of the interesting things to see is how Microsoft will price access to the Office Web Apps. It has talked about them largely as an adjunct to their desktop counterparts. At the same time, Microsoft workers have said that businesses will be able to offer Web-only access to employees, an option that some companies seem eager to take up.

"We don't think of the Web apps at all as replacements," Leblond said, but acknowledged that will be a "tempting model" for some customers. He also added that there are some Web-only features that make sense, given that the Web apps work only when there is an Internet connection.

The desktop software also needs to work better with the Web, Leblond said, adding that Microsoft is looking at how to make it possible so that documents can automatically be saved in the cloud. Today, Microsoft has a number of options to save to the cloud, including Live Mesh, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Office Live Workspace.

Ultimately, customers just want access to their data, he said, whether that is on a PC or from the cloud. He pointed to the way Outlook has a cached mode that works when there is no network connection, but that the data is ultimately synchronized with a server. "That's a terrific model and certainly one that we strongly believe in."

For more from Leblond, check out this video interview.

Just because Office 14 won't be fully released until next year doesn't mean consumers will have to wait that long to try out the products.

In an interview this week Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said that Microsoft will offer more details on the beta "relatively soon," noting that Office has traditionally made its products available to millions of testers well before the final version ships.

"That's been true of the suite," he said. "That will certainly be true of the suite this time and of the Web apps."

Capossela

(Credit: Microsoft)

With Office 14, Microsoft has said it will offer desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote as well as versions that can run online in a browser, be it Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. As previously noted, that means that for the first time Office will also work on both Linux and Apple's iPhone. CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts last week that Office 14 would not come out this year.

Microsoft has already started testing some of the components that make up the Office 14 wave of products. Capossela wouldn't go into too many specifics about when Office 14 would ship, but said Microsoft hoped not to be too far beyond its typical cycle which sees new versions roughly every three years.

"I don't think Office 14 is going to be wildly different," Capossela said. "Office has had a pretty predictable ship rate and I think we will continue with that."

The last version of Office, Office 2007 was finalized and made available to large businesses in late 2006 and had its consumer launch with Windows Vista in January 2007.

As for the new Web-based products, Capossela reiterated that they are already being tested "with a small set of people."

"We will look to expand that number relatively soon," he said. The final version, though he said, won't come until the desktop version of Office 14 is also done. "In terms of when things will be completely done we'll take the beta name off when the wave is completely done," he said.

For businesses, though, Capossela said Microsoft is competing plenty well with its current suite, Office 2007. Although the company had some high-profile customers consider a move to Google Apps, Capossela said that the pressure has actually waned some.

"The bloom is off the rose I would say when it comes to Google in the enterprise," he said. "Last year there was a nice halo effect for their brand for their business offerings."

But he said, the actual business adoption of Google's productivity software has been low. "I think the reality is Google isn't an enterprise company. Microsoft wasn't an enterprise company a long time ago and it took us years to earn the credibility."

Capossela pointed to the fact that many of Google's products, even the ones it sells to businesses are still in beta form.

"Businesses don't bet on beta," he said. "Google has been in beta for their stuff for I don't know how long...Companies have a very hard time paying for software that says it's in beta."

But customers, he said, do see Web-based productivity software as a way to expand the number of workers who get access to software. That's particularly true in industries like manufacturing and hospitality, where many employees don't have their own PC.

"Certain industries lend themselves much more to a lightweight, deskless (approach)," he said. "There's no PC (that) they have there as part of their daily job but there is an opportunity to provide them with more technology."

No word on Web apps pricing
Microsoft already has a cheaper "deskless" option for companies that want to provide such workers access to both Exchange e-mail and to a SharePoint portal server. The company hasn't said exactly how it will price access to the new Office Web Apps, but it has said that customers that want to provide certain workers only with Web-based Office access will be able to do so.

"This will become a lot clearer when we finalize our packaging," Capossela said.

In the time that Microsoft has been building Office 14, cost-sensitivity has increased as the economy has deteriorated. Although Capossela said Microsoft is still building the same product it set out to, he acknowledged that the company has changed its messaging somewhat.

"We change the way we talk to customers to be much more focused on how we can take costs out," he said. But, at the same time, Capossela said that businesses want to hear about more than just ways to save.

"I do think that beyond the cost savings there is a thirst for the new styles of productivity that take into account collaboration," he said. Many businesses see the amount of time and energy workers put into social networking and personal blogs.

"A lot of IT people see that energy going outside of the business space," Capossela said. "How do you actually put that into more of a business context?"

Office, particularly SharePoint, already has tools for turning a portal into more of a companywide social-networking site. The company has said it wants to extend that with the new version, although Capossela declined to offer any new details on what shape that might take.

Microsoft VP Rajesh Jha likens building complex software to building a skyscraper. With Exchange 14, though, Microsoft is having customers set up their offices even while the building is under construction.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

REDMOND, Wash.--Rajesh Jha likens complex software projects to building a skyscraper.

That means in the end, the thing might look pretty good. Along the way, though, it tends to be kind of a mess.

"If you walk by the site of a skyscraper under construction, it looks chaotic," Microsoft corporate VP Rajesh Jha said in an interview last week. "It looks confused. You will see dirt, scaffolding."

At the end, though, if it is useful, it will be something worth all the dust.

"If it is designed well, what comes out is something that adds a lot of value, something that folks use for a long time."

But, with the next version of Exchange, Microsoft is actually going to be letting people work from the skyscraper while it is being built. That's because, although the server version of Exchange 14 won't come out until next year, millions of people are already using a hosted service powered by an early version of Exchange 14.

The last version of Exchange, Exchange 2007, was also designed to be run as a hosted service in addition to something used by businesses on their own servers. The last time around, though, Microsoft built the server software first and then delivered the service.

In developing Exchange 14--and indeed many components of the next Office--Microsoft has flipped the switch and is instead developing the service first and doing the server work second.

"In many ways, this wave was about embracing software plus services from the very beginning," Jha said.

By doing the service first, Microsoft is able to create a large base of testers early on. At a comparable stage of Exchange 2007's development, there were a few thousand people running an early version. This time around, Microsoft has 4 million testers, in large part because Exchange 14 is now the engine behind the Exchange Labs service that powers e-mail for many universities and other educational institutions.

That has meant a lot of changes to Redmond's skyscraper construction operation. "The way we do production and testing has really changed in a dramatic way," Jha said. "The release time frame has become so compressed."

In a sense, Exchange 14 isn't really a new piece of software as it is a bunch of updates to the Exchange Online service. "Then we collapse them and build a server," Jha said.

Keeping things neat and tidy amid chaos comes somewhat naturally to Jha, whose office is nearly immaculate, with only a few books, a couple of old boxed copies of Microsoft Works, and the "Ship-it" plaque that commemorates all of the products he has helped get out the door. Jha explains that he moves frequently and his goal was to get his office contents such that they take only one box to pack. (He narrowly missed that goal in his last office shuffle three months ago.)

"I'm moving again next month," Jha said.

For more from Jha, check out the video interview I shot last week.

REDMOND, Wash.--Among the many tidbits in Steve Ballmer's talk to financial analysts Tuesday was the fact that folks should not expect the next version of Office, code-named Office 14, to come out this year.

"From a strategy perspective, the next big innovation milestone is Office 14, our next Office release, which will not be this year," Ballmer told the Wall Street crowd. "There's a version of SharePoint. There's a version of Exchange. There's a new version of Office Live."

As it has been with Windows 7, Microsoft has been cagey about when to expect Office 14, though some thought it might yet come out this year. Windows 7 is still expected to come out later this year, in time to be on PCs sold during the holiday shopping season.

With the last update to Office, Office 2007, Microsoft made a lot of changes to the way Office looked, completely changing the user interface and adding the "ribbon" metaphor.

This time around, the changes are focused in other areas. One of the big changes with Office 14 will be the fact that, in addition to the desktop versions, Microsoft will also be coming out with a set of "Office Web Applications" essentially slimmed-down versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that can run via a Web browser. And not just Internet Explorer. Firefox and Safari support will mean that Office, for the first time, will also run on Linux machines as well as Apple's iPhone.

Microsoft has started early testing of both Office 14 and its Web-based parts, but public testing is not expected until later this year. Exchange 14 is also being tested by about 4 million people, though many of them don't even know it. That's because Microsoft's Outlook Live service (formerly known as Exchange Labs) for Live@edu users at tionaeducal institutions is running on an early version of the new Exchange..

As for naming, I'd expect Microsoft to call it Office 2010, based on past naming conventions as well as a few slips of the tongue I heard in some meetings this week.

Speaking of which, I'll have a bunch more posts in the coming days on the making of Office 14, based on a number of in-person meetings with folks here this week.

As a teaser, here's a video of Microsoft's Antoine Leblond talking about some of the thinking that went into Office 14.