Microsoft Previews Office 11, New Tablet PC Software
Jeff Raikes, group vice president of productivity and business services at Microsoft, delivered the conference's opening keynote address and told audience members that worker productivity will increase drastically by combining "metaphors" for communication, such as a computer screen, handwriting, and the telephone.
"This will be a decade where we see a convergence of some of these metaphors," Raikes said. "We have to think of all these devices and the way we work with them as the platform [instead of just the PC."
To that end, Raikes introduced the forthcoming Microsoft Office 11, which is scheduled for release next summer, and gave the audience a quick look at the upcoming Office 11 Outlook application. Raikes positioned the new Office version as a tool that will reduce time spent on gathering and integrating data. Office 11 will offer more XML support, which Microsoft has been promoting heavily with its .Net platform, an XML Web services strategy.
"By the middle of this decade, instead of filling out school forms for your kids, you should be using XML-structured documents," Raikes said.
He also highlighted the tablet PC as another tool that offers convergence. Raikes announced the Nov. 7 launch date for the new Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which will allow users to handwrite notes on the tablet screen and transfer the handwriting to text for an e-mail document, for example.
Microsoft has been heavily touting the tablet PC over the last year. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates made it one of his focuses during his keynote address at Fall Comdex 2001 and predicted massive growth for the model. Raikes showed off several tablet PCs from such vendors as Fujitsu, Toshiba, Acer and Hewlett-Packard and praised the technological advancements of the latest models.
"There's a lot of great work going on with our hardware partners," he said.
In addition, Raikes said Microsoft's new Pocket PC Phone Edition will be offered this summer through Voicestream's telephone service. The operating system, which is a spin-off of Microsoft's Pocket PC OS for PDAs, features integration between PDA and telephony capabilities for dual-use devices such as the Handspring Treo.