My first experience of the new Office suite came when I it was still called Office 12. My excitement was about the new user interface. I must admit I am a fan of how Microsoft approaches it’s UI more specifically in it’s applications than how Windows handles it per se. So now I come to use Office 2007 Beta 2 (I recently rebuilt my home PC to both Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2) I had to take a closer look.
‘Uncluttered’, ‘task oriented’ and ‘self evident’ are terms I’ve heard applied to it. For me it’s the influence of the web making it’s way into Microsoft’s flagship Information Worker suite. And improved it is. After the initial 20 minutes or so culture shock I kinda get it. More importantly I wanted to know more about the suite’s integration with things like blogs, wiki’s and RSS in general.
If Outlook 2007 handles my RSS as though it were email and Word is my publishing engine then I’m happy. It truly will bring these web mediums to the masses. Knowing that SharePoint 2007 now has templates for blogs and wiki’s provides interesting corporate opportunities. Afterall that’s why and how I first discovered blogging. I was looking for a simple way to have a project diary that I could publish to a web site.
I tried to post this from Word 2007, but it didn’t seem to work so I’m going to keep investigating that.
I’ll continue to post my thoughts on the new UI… or more to the point the lack of it.