Interview: Office System tightens client and server bond
Gytis Barzdukas discusses Office as a development platform and Microsoft's goal to integrate it with Windows Server and SharePoint
Follow @infoworldMicrosoft's Gytis Barzdukas would seem to be a man in the right place and right time to carry out Microsoft's stated strategic goal of more closely knitting together its Windows Server 2003, SharePoint servers, and Office System 2003 products. While Barzdukas has for the past 20 months served as Director of Office Product Management, over the past nine years at Microsoft he helped guide Exchange Server and SharePoint Portal Server to market. Barzdukas sat down with Editor At Large Ed Scannell to discuss how Microsoft is positioning Office System 2003 as a development platform, how it is resonating with developers, and how future versions of Office might exploit Longhorn.
InfoWorld: Some analysts are saying that the deferred revenues from Office are way down.
Barzdukas: We saw that trend and then it got reversed at the end of last quarter. Things have improved to some degree. Our renewals and enterprise agreements with users are starting to pick up again. There were a whole set of users who may have pre-bought before Office 2003 was launched. It is just the natural cycle of renewals. We have users whose fiscal years end in December and that is when they buy, and then there is another set of users who buy at the end of our fiscal year, which is June 30.
InfoWorld: You have been promoting Office System as a development platform. How is that message resonating with corporate and third-party developers?
Barzdukas: It is starting to resonate with customers. I was meeting recently with our Architectural Partner Board, a group of third-party partners who we do a lot of development work with on .Net, and they said they were skeptical when we started bringing out that message. But then they took a look at the Visual Studio tools for Office and they said, "Hey, this stuff is actually pretty cool. Give us more of that so we can integrate apps [with] PowerPoint or Outlook, like we can with Word and Excel." So we are starting to get some traction with the engineers and developers, who are looking more at Office as a true platform.
InfoWorld: How much will XML help the perception of Office as a development environment? Are their fates tied?
Barzdukas: Absolutely. If you think of all the products we have had centered around XML, we had the tools such as Visual Studio .Net, then we had Windows Server 2003 which provided the underpinnings for the back end for things like SQL Server, then with Office System we finished the circle where we now have the desktop, which is a native player around XML. So those users interested in using [Office] as their platform, now have the tools, back-end server, and a rich client environment to build those types of solutions. Are we seeing a total tidal wave around this technology? No. But we are seeing good traction and customers like Merck, which is using InfoPath to do a lot of their critical drug trial reporting.
InfoWorld: What is the biggest thing people do not understand about your strategy of integrating Office System 2003, SharePoint Server, and Windows Server 2003?
