2007 Office system - and the new Office Services
Bill Gates has delivered another keynote - this time at the Office System Developers Conference yesterday (view the recording here...). I listened to the recording, and even though I'm not a developer, I wanted to hear what he has to say about the new way that the 2007 Office system connects, interacts and exchanges information with another application. I really love this version of Outlook - since I've installed the 2007 beta I can't go back to my other PC version (using Outlook 2003). So it's certainly changed the way I manage my team (I love the way that if I don't get round to completing a task one day, it hops onto the next day, so I get an ever increasing list of stuff to do..). Bill talks about the ribbon (which takes a bit of getting used to, I can tell you!) and about the new server side of Office.
There's a nice demo too on how Sharepoint 2007 server connects to back end data stores too, talking information from Excel services (which is programmable) and publishing it into the portal, using custom actions to create different UI's. The demo also covered using Infopath forms services to submit a form to a form library to be used by workflow. Impressive demo of collaboration between products.
By the way, if you want to stay in touch with what's going on with Sharepoint by subscribing to the Sharepoint Team blog and don't forget to keep in touch with whats going on in XML land on Brians blog...