Offices of the future
By Simon Williams
While showing no signs of being paperless, future office suites may be virtual, as Simon Williams discovers. Prepare to download your word processor, as well as the documents you create with it.
HardCopy Issue: 40 | Found In: Business | Published: 01/05/2008 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010
Office suites are mature applications, with the few remaining numbering their versions into the teens. So it’s reasonable to ask, what’s still left to improve? Before Microsoft Office 2007, it looked like it was just tweaks here and there; but then came the Ribbon.
A major redesign of a key component of the suite’s interface showed us there was still life in the development labs on Microsoft’s campus. Whether you like the new interface or not, it proves there are still changes to the way we work that are worthy of consideration. There are ways in which traditional applications such as the word processor and spreadsheet can be enhanced to make more use of rich media, too. A worksheet doesn’t have to look like a page from a primary school maths book.
However the next development may not be one of technology or interface, but rather in the way we obtain and pay for our applications. There are still moves to sell office suites by subscription, both for versions supplied in the traditional way and installed on your PC, and for those you run online, where the application is never actually stored on your local machine. The story of the office suite is far from over.
Office expansion
Microsoft now offers a collaboration and online storage site for Office customers - a halfway house to online applications.
As always, Microsoft is tight-lipped on future developments for its key application money earner. Having delivered a major upgrade in Office 2007, the next version isn’t scheduled for release until 2010, when it’s likely we’ll see further development of the interface and more back-end support. Both SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange have proved popular as companies look to spread application resources within and outside the physical bounds of office walls.
The introduction of the Ribbon interface has been an interesting one for Microsoft. Customers tend to either love it or hate it, but those who persevere through what the company calls the ‘speed bump’ tend to reach or surpass their previous levels of productivity, according to research by Forrester (see panel).
The change of work style is a major driving force for Office development, says Chris Rothwell, Microsoft’s Product Manager for Office Client. He recalls how ten years ago, many companies would have just one Internet-connected PC and emails were a rarity. Now things are getting more and more Web-centric: one reason why Microsoft has launched Office Live Workspace allowing colleagues to share Office documents despite being separated by thousands of miles. Even with these leanings towards the Web, Rothwell says Microsoft currently has no plans to develop an online version of Office in the mould of ThinkFree or Zoho. To do any useful work on Office Live Workspace, other than just viewing or annotating, you need to have some form of Office installed on your machine.
The mix-and-match approach of applications within the Office suite is set to continue. Microsoft sees this as a good way of tailoring Office to the needs of different customer bases and cites the success of OneNote, which started life in Office 2003 and has proved popular in two key segments: educational customers find it very useful as a research application while those in larger enterprises find it a convenient general-purpose information tool.
As for subscription models for buying Office, these already exist at the corporate level and some retail products, such as Groove, are also available on subscription licences. Microsoft is open to adjusting payment methods to what its customers request.
Numbers up
Another indication of how office suites may develop can be found in the Numbers module of Apple’s iWork 08 suite. This is a fairly radical departure from what we traditionally consider the province of a spreadsheet.
Silverlight and Air
In the same way that ThinkFree relies on the Java Virtual Machine, Microsoft and Adobe are busy developing platform tools which could well be used to deliver online applications. Microsoft’s Silverlight is aimed more at countering Adobe Flash than fathering an office suite, although it could easily do so.
Adobe AIR, not to be confused with Apple’s half-a-laptop, is another technology designed to deliver Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Look at the 60-plus free applications that Adobe provides on the AIR site and you’ll see lots of timesheets, stock quote and project schedule applications, in among the games, clocks and Twitter clients. AIR is just as suitable as a vehicle for text-based applets as it is for the more fancy graphics – Google’s Analytics Reporting Suite is written in it, for example.
Having the right tools for producing RIAs is part of the battle. Getting them accepted in the market on large numbers of PCs, like PDF and Flash, is key to being able to deliver a range of online applications.
A worksheet in Numbers 08 needn’t be one contiguous set of cells. It works more like a whiteboard onto which you can add tables. The tables may be linked or separate and their cells can still be connected through formulae in the time-honoured way. The ability to separate data tables and move them around makes Numbers 08 much more like a desktop publishing application with a good head for figures.
You can lay out all kinds of publication within the program, especially catalogues and price lists, with much more of an eye for layout and design than in a more conventional spreadsheet. It’s easy to pull in photos and illustrations and to colour areas of a Numbers 08 page. The program may not have the depth of analytical function that Excel boasts, but as a general-purpose tool it shows one way spreadsheet design could advance.
Moving online
Despite Microsoft’s reluctance to join the game, another big move we’re likely to see is into online applications. Rather than having separate copies of major applications on every PC, our applications are held on an online server and downloaded, typically as Java applets, when we need them.
ThinkFree
Widely considered the best of the online office suites, ThinkFree Office3 is due for a major revamp as we go to press and the new version should be available by the time you read this. There are three main modules in the suite: ThinkFree Write, Calc and Show which mirror Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Although it takes longer to fire up than Microsoft Office, once you’ve selected an application and loaded your document, editing is carried out locally and you should notice little difference in the performance of the two suites.
The feature sets of the ThinkFree applications are smaller than their Microsoft counterparts, but using the ’90 per cent of people use 5 per cent of the features’ rule, they will be enough for the vast majority. To give you some idea, ThinkFree Write supports columns, tables, the insertion of pictures, drawing tools including AutoShapes, a live spellchecker and even a word count to keep journalists happy.
ThinkFree runs under a Java Virtual Machine and you’re supplied with up to 1Gb of server space to store your documents. Documents are compatible with the older Microsoft Office file types, but currently not with the XML-based formats used by Microsoft Office 2007. There are good collaboration tools and, of course, you can share documents with anyone else registered with ThinkFree, directly across the Internet.
With no major shocks for anybody who has used Microsoft Office, ThinkFree Office3 is free on any indivual's PC.
The advantage of using something like Java or AIR as an intermediate operating platform is that online applications can be made non-system specific. Most of the online office providers already support Windows, Mac and Linux platforms with a single suite.
Even with fast broadband links, these applets need to be tightly written if they’re going to download in a reasonable time. To get over this, some offerings download to the local machine and hold the applications there, so only the document files need to be recovered for successive sessions on the same machine.
At the moment nearly all are free to the individual, funded either by advertising or through corporate sales. An office suite that works effectively through online connection is also ideally placed to be run on a network server and used throughout an organisation, applying a normal thin-client paradigm.
This ad-funded utopia may not continue into the future, though. If companies can persuade us that the slight inconvenience of having to download portions of the applications we use, as well as our documents, is worth it for the convenience of having access to them from any Internet-connected computer, then there’s no reason why a subscription model shouldn’t be introduced. It already works for services such as anti-virus and spyware protection.
In fact, subscription licensing for office software is something software manufacturers would like to introduce, whether they’re selling applications in boxes or as virtual applets downloaded from their own servers. The subscription model smoothes out their income streams so they don’t get big bulges with the introduction of new versions which tail away as time moves on.
As a core set of applications for virtually any business, the office suite is not going away any time soon, but it is moving with the times. As business practices change, particularly taking on a more distributed workforce, core application software has to move with them. Storing and accessing your documents online is still in its infancy but is a trend that could well be followed by storing and accessing the tools that create them online too.