Office 2007 - User Interface finalised

Looks like the Office 2007 team has been hard at work. The UI has been finalised and looks fantastic. Each Office UI will now be skinnable and will support glass in the upcoming Windows Vista. What does this mean for developers and BI in general? Not too much really, it just looks cool.

Jensen Harris has posted screenshots of all the Office apps along with more background on what changes have been made since Beta1 and why. There's also a post on the Excel 2007 blog with some more great looking shots.

Apart from the obvious UI fluff our ability to create, deploy and manage good-looking, easy-to-interact-with data will become simpler, faster. We all know that users love attractive reports. As I mentioned in a previous post the less time we need to spend producing fluffy reports the more time we can spend building & maintaining the structures that support and produce that output and that, IMHO, is a good thing.

We all know that MS are working hard to produce a suite of products that make a compelling case for businesses to upgrade to the next version. Of course MS want everyone to upgrade, Office is second only to Windows in terms of the revenue it brings in. That said, I think they've made the choice easy, and I for one really hope that Office 2007 gets into the market fast. Apart from the improvements, both in functionality and usability, to the apps themselves there is a lot of stuff that we will be hearing much more about in the near future: Excel Services, Groove, Workflow etc.etc. The lines between what is an Office app and what is SharePoint or just a web page will start to become a bit more blurry from later on this year. Office and SharePoint pretty-much become the vehicles through which everything is available to the enterprise. So there's really a lot more than meets the eye when you're talking about "the Office 2007 suite", it's not just Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook etc. any more.

That said, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the Beta1 Technical Refresh...