Microsoft's Office 12 is the next version of its Office System product, and some more details were unveiled at their Professional Developers Conference in September 2005. Some of the fancy new features will be a slick new user interface, a new document format based on XML, some content, document and records management features, as well as document workflow functionality, based on WWF, the new Windows Workflow Foundation. Many of these new features are extremely interesting, but technical details were not unveiled. The actual product with these features (and it would be no suprise if some of these features were changed or cancelled along the way) will not ship before the end of 2006.
In the Gartner analysis "Consider Microsoft's Office 12 Plans, but with Caution", they conclude that releasing some details of these many powerful and positive enhancements so far in advance of the actual delivery of the product may freeze the market for competitors, and this would be a pity. You should be cautious with your Office 12 plans because:
Although Microsoft will provide planning guides for the implementation of and migration to Office 12, it may be worthwhile - according to Gartner - to look at Office System alternatives such as IBM Workplace. Gartner calls Workplace "far more real today" than Office 12, as IBM is shipping Workplace Services Express and other Workplace products, and will be steadily enhancing its offering before the launch of Office 12. Workplace will also be OpenDoc-compliant, and is getting more and more collaboration features from Lotus Notes. Thank you Ed Brill for constantly telling us how great Lotus Notes is ...
More information about Office 12 can be found at the "The future of Microsoft Office" site, while you can find more information about its major commercial competitor at IBM's Workplace page. Another interesting commercial competitor is StarOffice, Sun's own collection of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database applications, which is the first product to support the OpenDocument XML-based file format, and is now in its version 8.
It is always interesting to read the story behind the IT operations of a world-renowned IT supplier. They have the same problems as other companies, but they are (if they want to "eat their own dog food" and "walk their talk", which they should do) limited in their choices ... Sun CIO Bill Vass explains Sun's infrastructure in this Utility Computing article.
The company of which their president Jonathan Schwartz now claims that "PCs are so yesterday" (which is further illustrated and more scientifically analyzed in this Computerworld article "Decline of the Desktop") exploits 35.000 open source desktops on thin-client front-end devices, running all of the applications on a lot of Sun machines. The major applications are an ERP system based on Oracle and CRM applications based on Siebel and Peoplesoft, now also owned by Sun's buddy Oracle. There are still Windows PCs around, but these are gradually replaced by open source desktops. As Schwartz points out, the next wave of innovations will be based on services, not on applications that run on the desktop. This makes the desktop operating system irrelevant, and that is exactly what Sun (and Google and IBM for that matter) wants to achieve. Sun also wants to move its global application infrastructure over to a grid structure, simplifying the mess that was created - as in many other companies - during the Internet hype years; and to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), for which they can (and will) use the solutions that were acquired via the acquisition of SeeBeyond.
As in most companies, Sun's CIO was also forced to look for serious cost savings, and found this in an almost pure thin-client setup. While this purity may be politically unachievable for many companies, it is our belief that for larger organisations, a consolidated, centrally managed, server-based computing infrastructure may really have financial benefits.