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With the impending release of Office12 (or Office 2007 or whatever Microsoft ends up deciding to call it,) there have been some demos, screenshots, etc. of the new Office functionality released that look interesting for helping to move the benefits of face-to-face, site-based communication out to non-site based workers.

Surprisingly, the Office application getting the greatest overhaul this version seems to be Word, which is a large change from Office 2003 (in which Word was practically unchanged from the previous version, while Outlook got the deluxe treatment.)  The UI is substantially changed, and in my opinion for the better.  Styles are more accessible (though not accessible enough); it's too bad that styles, one of Word's most powerful features, are so drastically underused since they're not presented in a very understandable way and thus people end up with "style pollution" in any documents that get shared among multiple people.

Outlook has gotten some improvements, though.  They've enabled side-by-side viewing and editing of multiple calendars (as well as the options of either viewing them entirely separately, or merging an arbitrary number of them onto one color-coded view,) which should be useful for anyone who needs to track more than one schedule (either other people's schedules, or their own for different jobs or projects.)  The task list and inbox are finally integrated (flagging a message for followup adds a task to complete,) making it a more functional organizational tool.  A "to-do" bar integrates appointments, tasks, and emails into one "Franklin planner" type view.  I wonder how much of this is a reaction to the new Google calendar -- looking at all of this, I can't help but think "now what would be really useful is putting all of this stuff on a web-site so that non-location-dependent workers could get at a full planner interface without carrying one around."  Google's new calendar, of course, is precisely that; I haven't looked at it enough to know how it is on organization and integration, but its actual calendaring/scheduling features look very nice.  Also, Outlook12 supports RSS feeds in the same way as mailboxes, newsgroups, or public folders -- it's not very compelling as an overall RSS aggregation strategy for Microsoft, but it does move Outlook closer to being "one-stop shopping" for daily information flows.

They've also put InfoPath into Outlook -- in other words, you can make a form with defined fields, email it to a bunch of people, and get back the tabulated responses to your survey instead of a bunch of emails.   And Project is integrated, too; a project manager can create a project, delegate tasks to various people in the enterprise, and have those tasks show up on their Outlook Tasks list.  There will be some sort of two-way feedback mechanism in this, though I haven't been able to try this out (most of Microsoft's groupware features require an Exchange or SharePoint server to work; great for the enterprise, not great for a blogger trying to check out beta software.)  Imagine being able to give project status updates within your tasks list instead of having to have constant "status update" meetings for every project -- that's the promise of this.  Time spent and tasks completed can be input directly, so the project manager can tell you're doing something without having to have you sit down at a table with him.  (Of course, the project manager should be able to tell by looking at the results of work, but we've all had project managers who don't have development knowledge.  Besides, project managers have managers, too -- and sometimes they won't take "I know my team, I can tell they're progressing according to schedule" for an answer.  They want numerical results, tasks completed, hours per day.  If nothing else, Outlook to Project integration will help feed the numbers machine.)

The big groupware project addition for Office12 is Office SharePoint Server.  SharePoint has been integrated into Office as a full member of the productivity suite.  It allows for resource libraries -- you could create a PowerPoint slide template, for instance, and put it into the library, where other people can make presentations based on it.  If you update the template, it automatically updates presentations based on it.  Workflow management can be defined and documents automatically routed through it.  They finally have real version control (as opposed to current versions of SharePoint, which have the utterly ludicrous feature of optional version control, in which each uploader can choose whether to add a new version or just clobber all old ones) and centrally managed policy.  

For the enterprise, at least (the market segment the Office division really cares about, whatever MS may say), it looks like they've actually produced a version of Office worth upgrading to.  It has its downsides (the radically new UI is less efficient for power users, and will require a total retraining of employees, retooling of training courses, rewriting of Office books, etc.), but the new features actually can improve productivity and project tracking in a way that a thousand Gantt charts full of wild-ass guesses can't touch.

It'll be interesting to see, in the coming months or years, how much of this functionality Google absorbs into their Calendar and Mail applications.  Most of Office's really good collaboration features depend on an enterprise environment (i.e. site-based & behind a firewall) that can host an Exchange or SharePoint server.  Google has the advantage that it is the server, so it can offer these features as part of its base offerings, rather than charging an extra few thousand dollars for serverware.  Of course, its disadvantage (lack of control; corportations don't like having their private information -- which usually means all their information -- on servers they don't own) may prevent real enterprise adoption, but I could see it being used by small companies.

Or maybe that's their real plan... package their collaboration software as an application service provider.  Pay to get mycompany.google.com as a server controlled by your company, and offering all the Google mail and calendar products.  The "Google Office" concept has been mostly dismissed, as Google is in no position to offer direct competitors to products like Word and Excel.  But what if those aren't the office products they intend to compete with?  It fits in well with the whole "Web 2.0" concept to have Google try to be the office suite for the distributed office.