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Microsoft’s flagship office system has a facelift and a new lease of life in the Office 2007 version which launched at the end of 2006. A new simpler user interface, a new document format and… er… new icons to click when you launch Office

For home users Microsoft Office 2007 introduces easier ways of doing exciting stuff like letters using Word and weekly homework timetables using Excel. But, these things can now also be done for free, equally as simple and via any web browser (and therefore any PC) by using Google Apps.

So how will Microsoft compete in this new world of free applications supported by advertising revenues? Well I started to get an insight into what the mighty Halls Of Redmond are thinking. There have been a few articles on thr web so far highlighting a slighly new direction for Microsoft Office starting with the next release - Office ‘14′.

ZDNet reported in April last year that Office 14 would be far more aligned with businesses. We can expect to see a version of Office for people who work in Human Resources, one for Finance, an a special version for people in R&D. This ‘Office as business application’ approach has been building for some time now. MIcrosoft have an alliance with SAP which has produced Duet, an application and framework for using the Office suite to front business processes built on SAP.

Then earlier this month AeroXperience posted an article giving a few more details about what Office 14 is likely to hold. The article states:

Three major organization-wide areas of investigation and investment will be “Enterprise Content Management,� which pertains to the authoring, management, and organization of complex documents and content, “Communication and Collaboration,� which pertains to keeping communities, co-workers, partners, and customers in sync, and finally, “Business Process and Business Intelligence,� which involves making the right information available throughout the process of doing business. At the center of these three areas is “Individual Impact� which is explained as helping businesses amplify the impact of their people/customers.

So Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Communication and Collaboration and Business Processes and Business Intelligence are the three core areas of Office 14. Arguably you could say that about Office 2007. For instance, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 now includes aspects of document management, web content management and workflow. Office 14 will go further. How do I know? Well I was invited to speak with some guys from Redmond at a meeting with Microsoft in London. Specifically to talk about ECM. For the last month or so Microsoft has been talking to major customers about what their requirements are in these three areas.

All I can say is that Microsoft will go further with Office 14 into the area of the Office System being the main front end for people in organisations to do business process work. No, people are going to manage power plants, or run production lines using Excel but more and more products from companies such as SAP and EMC will ‘disappear’ behind a veil of Office.

So what’s in it for those companies? Well, SAP stated at SAPPHIRE last year that Duet was all about targetting the hundreds of millions of users of Office in business. SAP have about 15 million users of their software so the slice of the pie to aim at is much larger for them. The native SAP GUI is notoriously hard to use and not well presented. Putting Office infront is a way of making the core business processes offered by SAP more approachable. And what’s in it for Microsoft? Well they get to spend their time integrating with middle and back office systems. At the same time Microsoft will deliver higher and higher end business systems in areas that they have traditionally had weak offerings. I anticipate the next version of SharePoint Server to include much of the functionality of mature document management systems like EMC’s Documentum.

Come June 2007 the guys from Microsoft will have analysed the requirements and decided what they’re going to build and what they aren’t going to build. At that point it’s heads down and $980 Million dollars of R&D to go. Expect Office ‘2009′ in…. er… 2009.