Interview: 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.

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.