Office productivity suites finally got interesting again
The past few weeks have seen a major flurry of industry activity, comment and posturing in the office productivity software arena. For five years or so - ever since the end of the small blip that was
Corel's vain attempt to build a viable
office productivity suite in Java - this part of the world of business software has been a sleepy backwater, where Microsoft has continued to dominate despite significant reported customer dissatisfaction, and potential competitors have failed to capitalise on opportunities.
With the debut of "Office 12" at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference earlier this month, however, the company has started to reveal the plan which it hopes will rejuvenate its profit powerhouse - at the same time as key customers (led by the Commonwealth of Mass.) start to bare their teeth, and as competitors (led by
IBM and
Sun) start to launch new offensives.
Microsoft is starting - through serious engagement with software developers, closer links with Sharepoint, addition of server-based functionality (in
InfoPath,
Excel etc) and integration with the new
Windows Worflow Framework - to shift the point of control that it exerts with Office away from ownership of file formats - and towards something which (thankfully) is much more interesting, at the end of the day, to its customers. That something is the management of business processes which involve "knowledge working". The issue of document formats is at the heart of the State of Massachusetts' blow to Redmond, and the fact that it lights the way for other big government clients around the world to follow, is only highlighting the timeliness of Microsoft's rethink. (Whether Microsoft will eventually support ODF is another question entirely).
What's interesting when you scratch away all the rhetoric - from Microsoft as well as from IBM (which is evolving its
Workplace offering to weave workflow, content management, application integration, portal and document collaboration functions together) is that there's a realisation occurring, finally, that office productivity software isn't about personal productivity - it's about organisational productivity. The people who use these suites are participants in business processes, just as the people who use Siebel or SAP apps are (and of course they're very often the same people - ref.
Mendocino, which IBM has yet to respond to, btw). Finally, it seems that the big IT vendors are realising that there is value to be driven from using business process automation and workflow technologies more holistically, to bring the office productivity and collaboration automation domains much closer to the domain of structured information processing.
