I caught up with Brock Allen just outside the main hall, so we wandered in together. Pre-session was obviously dropping a clue.
Opening video was pretty cool, as was the faux THX sounder. Bill came out next and was thanking us for attending PDC. Having the speech-to-text on the projection was very nice, thank you Microsoft. Nice slam on the blackout too.
Video of College recruiting was pretty funny. Bill in a vote for SteveO, Neopolean Dynamite spin-off. Lots of love for Office. The best, though was at the end, with BillG busting a move. Sort of. As Janell frequently reminds me, white geeks shouldn't try to bust a move.
Major annoucement on Office 12 is that ships with Visita. Bill brought out Chris Capossela (VP for Information Worker space) to dog and pony the combo. Confidence, Clarity and Connectivity message again. Alt-Tab changes to 'Flip" and new 3-D flip. Searchbox everywhere with predictive search results (hummm, pretty cool), and visualization of the in-doc data. Folder virtualization with keywords (pretty cool) as XML documents, interesting that the element is PersistedQuery. Brief discussion of "meta-data tainting," its really bringing document properties up to surface.
Covered gadgets (www.microsoftgadgets.com) as suspended-mode applications. Basically bundling a PDA into the laptop. Interesting.
Covered parental controls at their interface of ESRB standards. I guess that nice for home users. Also talked about Anti-phising bits.Also showed quick tabs. Shrink-to-fit printing (whoa, cool!) Drop down list RSS feed with pretty-print preview. RSS store for Vista -- that's pretty interesting. Talked about RSS as a business information sharing/publishing protocol.
Okay, so here comes the Office 12 stuff, started with Excel.
- "Better results faster" is major goal
- Office 12, superficially, looks to be mostly about making the UI better, not much talk about Office XML.
- Toolbars and menus are overloaded, so new UI is needed
- "Pick before you click" previews of style applications, table column headings become sheet column headings with scroll.
Excel: Menu clicks materialized as taskbars. Thumbnail previews, Auto-charting and one-click data analysis: Really nice.
Next came Word. Auto-Font preivew. Clearly pushing up the DTP aspects of Word as easily accessed features. Auto delete of hidden text and comments.
PowerPoint: showed text to graphics and text-diagramming and glow.
Recycle bin feature for SharePoint, Slide Libraries... WHOA! Cool! Content versioning of PowerPoint!
Outlook 12: To-Do bar is kind of slick. In-line previews. OLE is really getting done right. RSS reader in Outlook that's integrated with IE selected feed. Auto-syncing for off-line reading. Search with hit-highlighting. One indexer to rule them all. Outlook as an offline client with SharePoint.
BillG started talking about Digital Workstyle 2006. Integration at the Document-share/Semantic-share level. Predicited migration of fileshares to Sharepoint as the primary. Sees Sharepoint at the application platform for that.
Jim Allchin came out when BillG was done. Visited Windows 1.0. Nice. 1985 to 2005 was Computing for Enthusiasts to Computing for everyone. Showed Crytec's game video and why the PC was a better gaming platform. Holly Crap!
At this point, I just wanted to listen... :) And then Don Box and Anders started talking LINQ. More to come on that.