Feature:
People power with Office 2007
4 June 2007
Every organisation strives to get the best from its people and therefore does its utmost to provide technology that helps people achieve to their full potential. The next generation of office technology, Microsoft Office System 2007, will help remove many of the compromises that currently exist between technology and working practice.
Microsoft has been integrating the main office tools for two decades and now Office System 2007 is more open to integration and collaboration than ever before. The implementation of the Open XML Formats enables advanced data interoperability between Office System 2007 and enterprise business systems. Organisations can share and exchange information between Office documents and any source that abides by the open standards.
Businesses will find it much easier to include common elements in all documents and to deliver accurate and timely data into these documents so that everyone is working from the same information. Documents can remain 'live' up to the last moment before reporting or presenting.
Applications can automatically interrogate structured text (XML) and pull out information as required. For example, the marketing department could create a workflow to scan existing product brochures and to pull out sections of text relevant to a Web site about to go into production. By using tagged fields in Office applications, workers can pull in data from existing sources. Manually entered data, figures typed into an invoice in Word for example, can update the equivalent data held in an accounts system. Third-party applications can have interfaces that allow users to view and retrieve data from line-of-business applications and operational data sources from within the familiar Office environment.
Deploying Office at Enterprise level is a strategic project requiring migration from previous server systems to SharePoint Server 2007, upgrading to SharePoint Services 3 and moving Excel workbooks to Excel Services. The recommended sequence is to analyse the environment, identify migration issues and co-existence requirements, create a migration strategy and make a backup.
The desktop applications that make up the Office System are available in two packages. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 consists of Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Access, InfoPath, Communicator and Publisher. Office Enterprise 2007 has all of these plus OneNote and Groove.
Through integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services capabilities, Office Professional Plus 2007 offers the new teamwork solutions. SharePoint also enables integrated solution capabilities such as enterprise content management, electronic forms, and information rights and policy capabilities.
As you would expect, the individual applications are staying abreast of new technologies. Outlook has aggregation support for RSS feeds, allowing users to stay abreast of information related to their industry and to manage the information in the same way as e-mail. Users can flag RSS feeds for follow-up, assign them to Color Categories or automate how they are processed using the rules engine.
With SMS Link, Outlook users can send and receive SMS text messages and forward e-mail, contacts, tasks and appointments to mobile phones. They can also automatically forward e-mail, Outlook reminders and daily calendar to their mobile phone.
The venerable Word, first to adapt to Web page creation, is now the place for the marketing department to develop its blogs. Blog This! helps create blog posts complete with pictures, formatting and spell checking and then can quickly publish them to many common blog services.
Document Inspector is a new feature to help businesses with compliance work. It operates in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to helps users make their documents more secure and professional by detecting and removing confidential or unwanted comments, personally identifiable information, hidden text, or other information from a document before sharing it.
SmartArt Graphics - previously IGX Graphics - incorporates galleries of graphics and various effects to jazz up documents and presentations.
The Office Button replaces the File menu in Office 2007 applications, offering access to commands such as sending, saving and printing and to new functions for finalising the work, helping protect it, sharing it with others or participating in a workflow process.
The overall thrust of Office System 2007 is towards people working together effectively. Many of the new features and functions encourage an organisation's people, teams and partners to share ideas and documents regardless of time or place. Most conspicuously, Microsoft Office System 2007 offers group workspaces, automated alerts, integrated messaging and Web-based meetings.
The act of calling a meeting, for example, creates a Web site and sends out e-mail invitations. Changes to aspects of the meeting, such as time or agenda, are notified to attendees automatically. Users can check the site any time so don't need to keep information locally and authorised users can make changes, view a history of events on the site or take part in discussions.
Any authorised member of staff may set up a project on SharePoint, using either the standard design templates or those customised for the organisation. The users are added and within seconds the team can share important documents, work on them and incorporate full version control. The project may be discussed within the team - and access can even be allowed outside the organisation for suppliers or customers to contribute if required.
When it comes to presentations, users can link slides and related documents to SharePoint Technologies to keep them updated and enable them to be automatically synchronised if desired.
SharePoint turns the network into a central repository. Its easy to use tools encourage staff to share and rely upon common documents rather than copy versions to their local storage. Companies working with SharePoint are reporting that it reduces storage requirements through cutting down the duplication of documents.
All files may be searched using SharePoint's standard search facilities or enhanced using third-party options such as Concept Searching. Indexed search capabilities mean that workers can find resources they need and are not forced to duplicate work already carried out by colleagues or external partners. Searching extends to SharePoint sites across the organisation and line-of-business systems and reports.
Project sites are all available on any browser, wherever in the world the team find themselves. Users may be emailed when content is changed. Organisations can use SharePoint Server 2007's graphical workflow solution to help control the process flow more accurately. Implementing electronic forms (using InfoPath where appropriate) and workflow tools cuts down on manual and unnecessary steps.
SharePoint Server 2007 runs InfoPath Forms Services, which means that anyone can now access InfoPath forms through a HTML browser, on a PC or mobile device. For example, a warehouse operator with a dumb handheld device (not running Windows) could fill in forms that update the enterprise system.
Staff can use the InfoPath 2007 form designer to create Web-enabled forms, which can then be deployed to Forms Services. The form designer provides a compatibility checker to ensure that forms contain only controls and elements that are compatible with what Forms Services can render to the browser.
Staff can take advantage of the review and approval workflow capabilities of SharePoint directly from within Office applications, thereby reducing the time required for important document processes. SharePoint Server 2007 includes workflow templates to make it easier for end users to decide which workflows to apply to their content. In addition, a full workflow history is maintained so both end users and IT administrators can track the steps that occurred in their workflows and future steps in the workflow process.
Third party applications further enhance these capabilities, for example K2.net, which helps business users solve their business process automation problems themselves using the context menus. The wizard driven integration of K2.net with SharePoint Server enables routing and task management associated with document generation and approval in an organisation. K2.net integrates into the Microsoft SharePoint event model which means K2.net processes can be triggered when documents are checked-in, checked-out, uploaded and deleted.
SourceCode says that there are more than 200 new and enhanced features built into K2.net BlackPearl, which has been developed for Office System 2007. Ruan Scott, K2.Net's VP for EMEA says: "Customers have told us they want to incorporate the features of the 2007 Office System, Windows Vista and Exchange Server 2007 into their business processes. We started working with the Microsoft product teams very early in their development cycles to ensure the next generation of K2.net ? which we've code-named BlackPearl ? will be able to maximise these capabilities and the effort is paying off for customers."
Office System 2007 also provides enhanced tools with which to analyse the ongoing performance of a business. SharePoint 2007 includes a platform called Report Center for building dashboards and integrating with Excel 2007, SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL Server Analysis Services.
Recognising that many corporations maintain a significant amount of business logic in Excel workbooks, SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services is a server-side version of the traditional Excel calculation engine.
Excel Services also provides a server-side rendering engine that can display worksheets in the browser as HTML. This means a company can store its Excel workbooks in a centralised document library and make them viewable by users who don't have Excel installed on their desktops. Users, internal or external, can see the numbers displayed by a worksheet within the browser without having any access to the business logic behind it. This is a preferred method of collaborating with customers and suppliers. The desktop version of Excel 2007 has been enhanced to allow information workers with Excel expertise to publish and update their workbooks in a document library within a SharePoint Server 2007 portal site or a Windows SharePoint Services
team site. This allows a company to maintain a single master copy of its critical workbooks. It also allows the workbook author to post updates without the need to involve the development or IT staff. Workers can take advantage of formulas in Excel spreadsheets from across the network in a desktop application.
Excel 2007 also contains data visualisation tools, which are designed to help a user to discover and illustrate important trends as well as highlight exceptions in data. Users can apply conditional formatting more easily and identify trends by using coloured gradients, data bars and icons.
SharePoint Server 2007 has support for creating and importing key performance indicators and visual business intelligence indicators that tell a manager how some aspect of the business is doing, flagging business problems that require immediate attention.
A manager receives dashboard views that have been customised with data relevant to that manager's business area or responsibilities. High-level data is presented first but with the ability to drill down into more specific categories.
There's more 'hands-on' than ever before for every type of user of Office System 2007. More workers than ever before can create, locate and manage content, instigate collaborative projects, and design their own business workflows.
Office tools are how people get their work done, interacting with enterprise systems through integrated and connected documents and forms. SharePoint pulls it all together organisation-wide. It's the place where workers collaborate through projects, meetings, discussions and calendars.