Gates announced the features that developers can expect to see in Office 2007 at the Office System Developers Conference 2006 on Tuesday, at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Office 2007, due for release towards the end of the year, will feature a much greater level of programmability, including server-side processing of Office documents and other business information.
While the Office applications have been scriptable for many years, and available for use in custom-written applications in recent versions, Office 2007 will allow developers to work directly with XML-based files. The availability of server-side processing components for Office documents will allow documents to be changed as part of a custom-written application.
Gates told the conference that the new Office system represents a step change in capabilities for developers writing productivity applications.
"We think that it's revolutionary in terms of the class of application that people just haven't been able to write in the past. Now, with what we've done with Office 2007, we think we'll see an explosion of these of application" said Gates.
Gates also said that Office will form the bridge between back-end systems, such as ERP and CRM, and the end users. He argued that by presenting users with an interface they're already familiar with, they'll be more comfortable with applications, citing the use of Excel as a front-end to a business intelligence system as an example.
At the heart of the new system are the Office XML file formats. "With Office 2007 we have the logical file format in XML, so the idea of moving in and out of documents is radically different" said Gates.
He claimed that Microsoft's submission of its file formats to ECMA for approval amounts to a standardisation, and that this will mean the formats are stable.
The company has been criticised in the past for changing Office file formats in virtually every release.
Microsoft has also created a new organisation called OpenXMLdeveloper.org to promote its file formats. In a pointed dig at the OpenDocument Forum, Gates told the conference: "No organisation is good unless you put 'open' at the front".
Microsoft has refused to support the OASIS OpenDocument format in Office.
The new ribbon-based user interface in Office 2007 also represents another opportunity for developers to extend Office applications by adding their own components to the ribbon.
Gates explained that the new interface makes extensions easier for users to find: "It's a results-oriented interface. Things were hidden beneath those menus, and people didn't know how to find features in that two-dimensional structure. We think it's great for end users, but it also creates a framework for applications that we've never had before."
The last piece in Microsoft's Office development jigsaw is Windows SharePoint Services, which actually isn't part of the Office suite itself, but is part of Windows Server 2003.
This toolkit is used to build the SharePoint Portal Server product, and can also be used by developers to create their own collaboration applications. "The role of SharePoint as the basis for this new class of application is a very, very strong theme," said Gates.
ZDNet UK's Jonathan Bennett reported from London. For more coverage from ZDNet UK, click here.
Office 97 was the best version. The latter versions are bloated with annoying "features" like:
collapsing menus
useless clip art
Slow to start
Assistant
Did I mention slow.
Will they ever fix the 65000 row limit in Excel?
Yes progress... backwards.