Hi,

In several organisations I have seen Word, Excel and Powerpoint being used
collaboratively to create content. The issue is people go crazy with all the
formatting power and make changes that don't exactly contribute to the
effectiveness of the document. Then someone else has to clean up the mess.

I would like you guys to think of Office products, especially Word to be a
CMS workflow tool.

This means:

- Enable CMS and 'user roles'

- Have a more robust way of separating presentation and content from a 'user
roles perspective'. Most CMS tools do that well

- Enable a CMS work flow that includes the powerful features of review and
track changes that Office already has. You need review in Powerpoint too.

- Enable tagging and commenting. People don't use keywords in properties.
But they tag more and comment more.

- Supply a whole lot of templates for various types of document that people
are creating now. Google has studied how people author on the web. They have
published the statistics for this in their code page. It would be useful if
the office team studies what type of documents that people are generating
currently. I guess you would already be doing that. It needs to support
things like blogging, RSS reading and commenting.

- The big shift I would like to see in this office is that it should become
the tool of choice for Internet authoring (blog, photocasts, etc) and various
electronic reading.

- By the time Office 12 launches, you need to have a free MS blog site for
your users.

Cheers
Shan



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