Be prepared for Office 12

Office 12. It’s coming, and like losing the head off your beer, it’s impossible to stop. Microsoft recently gave us press pundits a first look at Office 12 Beta 1. Based on my testing, I can say that you’d best pay attention to this version of Office: It’s going to impact your life -- more so than previous iterations.

Folks with user-facing IT positions had better look at Office 12 (also known as XPS) with only one thing in mind: preparation. This time around, you’ll need to be worried about more than managing an orderly software rollout. You’ll need to match that rollout to user-training sessions. Whatever you do, don’t deploy this puppy on the desks of untrained users.

Power users can probably worm their way through, though there are enough advanced features that they'll almost certainly screw something up without proper documentation. But average users will be lost if confronted with these screens out of the blue, and you’ll wind up with a help desk nightmare. Moreover, it’s easy to see that this version is going to impact even network and desktop administrators in a big way.

I still have Office 12 Beta 1 installed on my spare Gateway CX200 convertible notebook (look for a review of that machine on my SMB IT blog in the near future). It is Beta 1, so please don’t think you’re missing much in terms of functionality. The software is still a huge resource hog, and many of the more detail-oriented features aren’t yet working: PowerPoint, for example, wouldn’t let me bring images from front to back and back again.

As stated in my preview, the new suite is packed with new features, both big and small. The graphical ribbon menu is the one that’s sure to wrinkle the brows of new users the most. Gone are the File/Edit/View drop-downs with which they’ve become familiar. Instead, they are confronted with a fat, gray morass of options and icons that are actually more efficient after users are trained how to use them, but the change can be nerve-racking for non-techie users the first time they encounter it.

Further, there are underlying features that could cause many problems. A big one is the powerful new file format. Based on XML and Zip technology, it allows users to save metadata into a document and even store multiple versions of the same document in a single file.

If you have users take advantage of this feature, you need to train them to process each document with the Finish menu option, consolidating all changes and clearing the document of unwanted comments and such. Without that, you could wind up having someone send a client every copy of a proposal from draft to final -- with markups. And because the new file format has its own menu option under Save As, it’s easy to hit it by accident.

Additionally, Microsoft is adding more back-end server support to Office 12. Document management is a key feature of the new Office Server, as is integrating that technology with WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation). Combined, the two can let you build your own customized workflow process using Office docs as the lynchpin. Configuring these back-end services, especially what’s been promised in WWF, is far from trivial the first time around. New administrators face not only Office integration hurdles, but deployment best practices and security issues, too.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not pooh-poohing Office 12’s new feature set. This is powerful and probably more efficient stuff when users get the hang of it. But, far more than any previous Office version, this one will need a clear and deep deployment map laid out for it -- one that includes training for IT staff as well as users. Without it, the first few months of Office 12 are going to be no fun at all.