Jeff Raikes outlines the future role of Office

YOU CAN CALL Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don't call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft's enormously successful desktop business -- the jewel of which is Office XP -- into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. In an interview with Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Editor at Large Ed Scannell, Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell, and News Editor Mark Jones, Raikes discusses Microsoft's .Net strategies, its increasingly important SharePoint Team Services, and how Microsoft's traditionally separate client and server groups are learning to work and play well together.

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InfoWorld: How do you see SharePoint's role?

Raikes: What we're doing with .Net servers is integrating the SharePoint Team Services capability as a foundation for this kind of collaborative routine work. SharePoint Team Services 2.0, initially, will probably be delivered as an add-on via the Web and then fully integrated into the product. Once you do that then you are significantly broadening the overall usage. You are significantly "up-leveling," what knowledge workers or information workers come to expect in terms of their collaborative capabilities. Then you can think of the work that we do with Microsoft Office as a great mechanism to connect into those facilities. I'm a big believer that there's a huge opportunity in terms of leveraging XML to help customers move to paperless workflow processes.

InfoWorld: What is Microsoft doing to better tie together Office 11 and .Net servers?

Raikes: If you look at what we did with SharePoint Team Services in Office XP, we in effect put in place a collaborative foundation. All of us in this industry have learned a lot about "collaboration" in the last 10 years, and clearly a lot of it's done via e-mail and more and more it's being done over intranets. What we did with SharePoint Team Services is we made it possible for people who weren't trained as Web site designers to be in effect a Web site designer, but they don't know they're Web site designers. What they know is they're getting a job done. They're setting up a site for fiscal year planning, for a Sixth Sigma project, for whatever may be appropriate. With SharePoint 1.0, we put that concept in place and it's being broadly adopted. It spread like wildfire. I mean, just in Microsoft alone there are something in excess of 15,000 SharePoint 2.0 Services sites. We had a site for our product quality initiative, a site for our fiscal year planning process, and so on and so forth.

InfoWorld: So what's the next important step relative to .Net servers?

Raikes: If you step back and look at the Windows server, what's valuable from a knowledge worker or information worker standpoint? You're getting the sense that I'm more of a fan of information workers than I am of knowledge workers as a term. Historically, the Windows server, or previously the Novell server, was all about file and print services. It was about how to share resources for the knowledge worker, for the information worker. What SharePoint Team Services does is it builds on that concept, taking it to the next logical step.

So what we're doing with the .Net servers is we're going to be integrating the SharePoint Team Services capability as a foundation for this kind of collaborative routine work. For example, with Office 11 look at what it can do for things like meetings. Meetings today are relatively underserved in terms of software technology. I mean there [are] a lot of things you need to do in terms of preparing for a meeting -- how you set the agenda, how you share the documents, and all of that. Now you can make that fundamentally a part of the Office client world. Today, take [for example] a document where you have a set of people collaborating. It's reasonably effective to send it around in e-mail; that's common for people to do. But especially in an environment like InfoWorld, I would think it would be nice if you just posted the documents that you're working on -- at least [a document you're] collaboratively working on -- right there on the SharePoint Team Services site.

InfoWorld: How do you see Groove fitting into this?

Raikes: We have been on the other side of the fence at times, but we've always respected and admired [Groove Networks founder] Ray [Ozzie]'s vision and technical ability. He has had a great impact on us. He sat in on some of our file storage or unified storage discussions and provided us [with] good feedback for some of the things in the .Net platform. The thing that I think customers are fascinated by with Groove today is the fact that you can do peer-to-peer collaboration, you can do it offline, you can do it through the firewall.

InfoWorld: So you can collaborate across an enterprise domain?

Raikes: Right. SharePoint Team Services has some great capabilities but [it] is very much focused within your corporate intranet and online. So with Groove you can extend SharePoint Team Services sites to go through the firewall and to be offline. So there's some very nice synergy there.

InfoWorld: How do you close the loop between not only Office on the desktop but also pervasive devices and moving forward?

Raikes: The way I like to think of it is that a lot of the solutions relative to the information work start out as something simple that adds value and then grow up because [they] can add value to a broader number of people. That's a general model I have in my head about a lot of solutions. Maybe an Access database that grows into a SQL Server application that people are using. In this particular context, what I think is important is that Groove provided a peer-to-peer way of connecting, and that was one of the great things about Notes. One of the things I love about what Ray figured out there is that he was able, at least initially, to avoid corporate IT being a gatekeeper that would prevent Notes from catching on. Notes got a grassroots sort of momentum. Groove, I think, gets a grassroots sort of momentum, but they're very cognizant of the importance of working closely with corporate IT. But clearly [Ozzie] has that model in mind where there's peer-to-peer capabilities that can evolve into server capabilities.

InfoWorld: But with the edge services project that Ozzie is working on, do you see that as having implications for SharePoint directly, or is that just a solo group initiative?

Raikes: Yes we're working closely with him on that. I mean, that was one of our goals with the .Net platform and that's an example of that technical collaboration. But in this context I was more thinking about how you can start out in a peer-to-peer environment and, as it grows into something that's more broadly used, you may want to get it into more of a robust managed server environment. And he has that model and that's a little different than the Edge services project. That's the idea of Groove having servers that allow corporations to do some of what they do in terms of a service. We think of this in this following way: Today you can think of Passport as a service that we run. But we feel strongly that one of the things we've got to do is to also allow our customers to be able to run authentication services, in effect a Passport service that can then federate with our service.

InfoWorld: I'm interested in some of the dynamics at play when your the desktop and server groups work together on a project. Do you need one group or the other to take control of a project involving the two?

Raikes: Do we need somebody in control? Sure, it's me. Let me give you a picture of how I think it works. First of all, we don't think of ourselves as a desktop [group]. That's very important. We don't think of ourselves as desktop and then the server. I think of my role more in terms of information work scenarios involving digital tools for information work. It's [an] important [difference] because what that means is we have a responsibility of thinking through what is the end-to-end experience. For instance, [the desktop group] built SharePoint Team Services. The Office team builds SharePoint Team Services so, therefore, they're not really a desktop team. The Office team builds SharePoint Portal; therefore, they're not really a desktop team. So that's a very important point.

InfoWorld: Were you implying that in your speech [at Microsoft's Fusion conference] last month, with the idea of basically providing a construct that could be used by your partners to construct applications that would do that?

Raikes: That's right. So I think there's the opportunity for new application areas. One of the things I have to do is to get people to think beyond Word, Excel, and PowerPoint because that's not the end of the value that we can create. There are new metaphors, there are new categories to be established. So in other words, I encourage my team to think not just about the "the desktop" but to think more about those scenarios and then what we would build in terms of client, server, and service value to deliver on that scenario.

InfoWorld: Bill Gates and Mark Lucovsky announced the Hailstorm effort about a year ago and subsequently talked about opportunities for using the Hailstorm architecture across the different product groups. Is any of the Hailstorm technology being used in your plans for Office of the near future?

Raikes: It depends upon what "Office of the near future" means to you.

InfoWorld: Well, when are you going to get to what I would calmly suggest is a real XML format for Word, as opposed to the XML data islands?

Raikes: Office 11. First of all, Office XP Word didn't have XML support. Office 11 not only has the same level of XML support that we had in Excel and Access but also a more advanced form of XML support that we have for all of those products in Office 11, which is the ability to support arbitrary schemas

InfoWorld: From an Office 11 point of view, how will that be influenced or not by the .Net service rollout, and how are you working the two together?

Raikes: Yeah, [the Office rollout is] pretty independent from the .Net server rollout, meaning I'm able to go ahead and introduce Office 11. The one thing that's a little bit of a glitch -- well, it's more of a timing thing with SharePoint Team Services 2.0 -- but in order to make it easier for Bill [Vechte's server group] and also easier for us with SharePoint Team Services 2.0, we believe .Net server rolls out before us and then we just do SharePoint Team Services 2.0 as a Web downloadable add-on for .Net server. And that's a way for us to make sure that we can build Office 11 capability that takes advantage of SharePoint Team Services 2.0 and get it out in the .Net server.

InfoWorld: When the very first .Net discussions were happening the term "universal canvas" was tossed around. What is the status of the universal canvas notion?

Raikes: Universal canvas really means the ability to have both data structures, in effect, converge around XML across the functionality that was represented in those application categories. It's one XML-driven table structure regardless of whether the table was in a word processor or within a spreadsheet. Even without fully delivering on that vision, we can still be able to do a lot of that. For example, snippet capability: At the point of entry or the point of capture, a snippet could, at least in theory, understand that there was structure there and capture that structure. But that's actually at the presentation layer as opposed to the data structure layer. And, to me, the universal canvas concept really revolves around getting to that data structure layer. I think one is near term and one is longer term. The point of entry/point of capture -- that's more near term, in my opinion.