The IW Center

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Redmond for a customer briefing.  While I was out there, I got the rare opportunity to interview Bill Gates, company co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft.  As you might imagine, his time is closely guarded, so I was ecstatic when I got 30 minutes on his calendar.  We sat down in Bill's personal office, where I asked him questions focused around the information worker space. 

During our session, Bill discusses the future of business productivity applications and how they are being influenced by consumer focused technologies like blogs and wikis.  He also explores how the workers from this next generation (digital natives) have different expectations for the tools they will use to collaborate and get their work done.  Bill also gives some insight into the next wave of innovation for the Office System, highlighting the work that we'll do in "Office 14" and beyond.  Finally, he talks about his transition to "part-time" at Microsoft and what types of projects he'll be working on in the future.

It truly was a thrill to be given the time to talk to Bill Gates.  I hope you enjoy the prodcast as much as I enjoyed recording it.   For those of you who prefer to read rather than listen, I'll be posting a transcript of the interview as soon as I get time to type it up.

Click the links below to play audio (20:41)

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For more information about Bill Gates, please see his website on Microsoft.com.

I've received a lot of feedback on my blog over the past year.  Sometimes people send me emails saying my content is great! Others have had "constructive criticism" about what I'm doing.  For example, I added MP3 and iTunes feeds based on the feedback that not everybody listened to WMA file formats.

However, the question that I get asked the most is "Why can't you spell podcast right?" and a close second is "Do you know you have a typo...it's spelled PODCAST without the "R"?.  To explain why I call my sessions "prodcasts", I need to take a step back and give you some background.

Internally at Microsoft, we have these monthly windows media audio recordings called "Drive Time" which allows us to learn about our products while in the car or on a plane.  They've been around for years...basically it was podcasting way before podcasting became popular.  So I always thought we should provide similar materials to our customers, giving them another medium to explore our products and solutions.  However, our internal materials aren't really suited for external consumption and the Drive Time team didn't have a charter to create customer-ready versions of their content.

So I decided to create my own audio sessions for customers to hear overviews of our products.  When I started this initiative last year, I wanted to come up with a catchy name for the project.  My goal was to provide content around the products that I personally cover in the personal productivity space...Office, SharePoint, Exchange, LCS, etc.   Somehow I came up with "Productivity Broadcasts" or "prodcasts" for short.  The name worked well for me, because my content wasn't exclusive to iPod's so Podcast didn't quite fit.  And this was well before Microsoft's Zune player came out (Zunecast doesn't quite have the same ring to it).

In my eyes, this project has been very successful. To date, I've recorded over 50 interviews with product and program managers covering the numerous products Microsoft has in the information worker division.  I get roughly 30,000 visitors a day (that's visitors, not hits) and now that my materials on the Microsoft.Com website, my traffic is steadily increasing.  I've even gotten the opportunity to interview Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Chris Capossela.

Anyway, that's why I call my sessions "Prodcasts".  If you'd like to provide feedback or ask me a question, you can always email me directly at TheIWC at Microsoft.Com

Thanks for listening.

Shawn

Later this week, I'll be interviewing a special guest for IW Talk...this will be a prodcast that you won't want to miss!!! (more about that very very soon) For the upcoming mystery guest, we'll be discussing the future of productivity tools and the direction of Microsoft information worker solutions. To set the stage for the upcoming session, I thought I would re-post my interview with Chris Capossela, who gave a great overview of the value of the 2007 Office System. Prior to the 2007 Office System launch, I was fortunate to sit down with Chris, who is the Vice President in charge of the Information Worker business here at Microsoft.

In this prodcast, Chris highlights the various trends that we're seeing in the business world and how productivity tools such as Office, SharePoint and our Unified Communications products are changing how people work together.

I hope you enjoy this discussion and stay tuned next week when I reveal the identity of my latest executive prodcast.

Click the links below to play audio (41:56)

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For more information on Microsoft Office 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.

In today's second prodcast, Anne Weiler details the newest offering in the Office System, Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. The Enterprise edition of Office 2007 is intended for highly mobile employees who spend a lot of time in meetings or on the road. A superset of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, Office Enterprise 2007 also includes Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 and Microsoft Office Groove 2007. If you are a information worker who collaborates with people in other locations or even within other companies, the Office Enterprise 2007 product may be for you.

Click the links below to play audio (12:39)

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For more information on Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.

Most customers are familiar with the two main boxes of Office applications, "Standard and Professional". With the 2007 versions of the main productivity applications, the boxes are evolving to include new technology and additional products. Now the main Office boxes for corporate customers will be "Standard 2007", "Professional Plus 2007", and "Enterprise 2007".

Today, we'll explore the two higher end sku's (store keeping units), Pro Plus and Enterprise.
Mark Alexieff, the Product Manager for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, spent a few minutes with me on the phone talking about why a customer might want Professional Plus instead of the Standard edition. In this prodcast, he details technology that will ONLY be available in the higher end SKUS, such as infopath forms integration, rights management, and enterprise content management components. He also touches on the additional applications included in Pro Plus; Access 2007, Publisher 2007 and Office Communicator (the enterprise IM client for Live Communications Server.

Take a listen to this prodcast to see why Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 might be for you.

Click the links below to play audio (16:43)
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For more information on Microsoft Office Excel 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.

One of the more exciting things about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 applications is the new default file format in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Based entirely on XML, the new OpenXML file formats are smaller, safer, and more flexible. Gray Knowlton, a Senior Product Manager in the Office division spent some time with me on the phone discussing the benefits of the new file formats.

Gray highlights how the new formats will save disk space on your network (Word and Excel documents are approximately 50% smaller than previous versions), make your networks safer by not running macros by default, and will make it easier to recover data if necessary. He also explores how you can now inject XML data INTO an Office document, making it easier to automatically create or update information, without even opening the Office application. Gray also talked about the "Save as PDF" feature and ability to create XPS (XML Paper Specification) documents.

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For more information on the OpenXML file formats, please visit the Microsoft website. If you're a developer, you can learn more on the OpenXML specs at the OpenXMLDeveloper.org site.

Back in March, I interviewed Gray Knowlton who is the Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Office Infopath 2007. In that prodcast, he mentioned that Infopath 2007 forms will also be able to be rendered and filled out via a web browser. This is probably the number one feature request from customers around the current Infopath offering and it should enable many new scenarios for capturing data via electronic forms.

To get more details on this new solution, I spent some time recently with Christian Stark, who is also a Senior Product Manager in the Office Division. Christian was actually on the product development team for Infopath 2003 and has now switched the "server" side to handle the new Infopath Forms Services and the Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007.

In this prodcast, Christian outlines the functionality for Infopath Forms Services and the primary usage scenarios for this great new technology. He details how InfoPath Forms Services are hosted on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and talks about the deep level of integration between the two products. Christian highlights how Infopath forms can be used as the front-end to an existing back-end processes or line of business applications.  He also discusses how Microsoft has built tools to provide centralized forms management for enterprise customers.

Finally, Christian also reveals details on the new Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 which enables customers to deploy Infopath forms to THEIR customers over the internet. This server was designed primarily for customers who want to build a pure forms solution without some of the additional functionality that SharePoint Server provides, such as authentication or workflow templates. For example, a government agency could provide forms for their constituents (permits, tax information, license and registrations, etc) and have the ease of use and flexibility that Infopath delivers.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Infopath and am happy to see the next release supporting browser-based forms. Listen to the prodcast and see if you don't get as excited about forms as I do!

Click the links below to play audio (20:09)
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For more information on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.

More than a decade ago, when I was working as a Microsoft Certified Trainer at a local training company in Raleigh, I was sent to learn a new Microsoft product called "FrontPage 1.0". Microsoft had recently acquired a company, Vermeer Technologies, whose only product was the website development tool. I was literally in the first class Microsoft taught to the public on the course, and it was one of the reasons I ended up a Microsoft. I flew out to Redmond to attend the course and then spent time on the Microsoft campus. Less than a year later, I was hired by Microsoft in Atlanta to be a Systems Engineer supporting NT and Exchange. Boy, how time flies... 

So I've followed Microsoft Front Page over the years, as it "grew up" in the web development space, evolving from Version 1.1 to FrontPage 97, then 98, 2000, 2002 and the current version 2003. If you've had a chance to pull down Beta 2 of Office 2007, you know that FrontPage as a product is not in the bits, so I thought some of you might be wondering where it is.
Jerome Thiebaud, a Senior Product Manager in the Office division, spent some time with me recently discussing the future of Microsoft FrontPage. Although FrontPage as a product is being retired, it is being replaced with two different products; Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer.

SharePoint Designer 2007 In this prodcast, Jerome talks about when you would use which tool and the intended audience for each of the two new products. He spends most of his time discussing the new SharePoint Designer tool...highlighting new customization options, support for master pages, graphical workflow tools and the ability to deploy "no-code" applications using SharePoint Designer's new data view web parts.

If you need to customize a SharePoint site or are just a long time FrontPage user like me, listen to this prodcast to hear about where Microsoft is heading with it's web development platform.

Click the links below to play audio (23:11)

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For more information on Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.

A few of the past week's prodcasts have touched on the new workflow engine that Microsoft will be shipping soon, so I thought it would be interesting to have a deeper drill-down on the subject.  I put out a few feelers to the product team to see who might be interested in doing an interview. Paul Andrew, a Technical Product Manager for the Windows Workflow Foundation, formerly code-named "WinOE", graciously accepted my invitation and spent some time with me on the phone recently. For those of you who follow Paul, he has co-authored a book on the subject which you can order from Amazon here. Paul also maintains a blog on the Windows Workflow Foundation, which you can read to get even more infomation.

In this week's prodcast, Paul gives an overview of the new Windows Workflow Foundation, which is part of the developer platform inside of Windows. He touches on some of the Microsoft products which will utilize "WF", such as Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, Speech Server 2007,  and many others. Paul stops short of saying "WF" will be THE SOLE workflow engine from Microsoft going forward, but he does say that that's the goal. Paul highlights some of the workflow templates that will ship inside of SharePoint Server 2007, such as routing workflows from within document libraries.

Later in the interview, Paul gives many examples of how the new engine will benefit developers, since it's part of the .NET Framework 3.0. Paul also mentions third party companies like SourceCode K2 and Captaris who are going to be incorporating the Windows Workflow Foundation into the next versions of their products.

If you'd like to hear more about Microsoft's overall workflow strategy and hear examples of how the 2007 wave of IW products will incorporate human workflow, listen to this prodcast.

Click the links below to play audio (22:59)
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It seems like everybody is talking about records management these days...or at least everybody's asking about it. With all of the government regulations, concerns about customer privacy, and company confidentiality, a good records management system is a critical part of most enterprise architectures.

I recently spoke to Manish Sharma, a Senior Product Manager in the Office division. He focuses on the enterprise content management solutions built inside of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

In this prodcast, Manish discusses how a document, email or other type of data can now be stored inside of SharePoint as a "record" with policies which define not only how long the document should be active, but what to do with the content once it expires. He highlights how the Windows Workflow Foundation can make automatic routing of these pieces of content a breeze, with pre-defined templates for approval processes and other "out of the box" scenarios. Manish also discusses third party solutions which compliment Microsoft's offering, providing specific functionality for key vertical scenarios. Finally, he also discusses how the other "management" types (web content management and document management) relate to records management within MOSS 2007 and where we've invested in new features and enhanced functionality.

For those of you who have been waiting for the new release to see records management become a fully supported solution...listen to this prodcast and start evaluating Beta 2 of MOSS 2007.

Click the links below to play audio (18:57)
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For more information on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.