Just returned from TechReady3 in Seattle. Me being a Information Worker consultant with Microsoft I focused on the upcoming Office Systems 2007 release and mostly on SharePoint v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). The reason it’s called MOSS is because it grows on you…. 😀 OK, maybe not the best joke.

There is a lot of new good stuff coming in this release. First of all it’s features asked for by clients (and us working with the products), such a recycle bin and Item level security in SharePoint and so on. The SharePoint UI is now restructured to be a hell of a lot more intuitive than in the 2003 version of the product. Other stuff that’s happened is that Microsoft Content Management Server is no longer a stand alone product, it’s built in as part of MOSS 2007. Huge benefit there I think.

But the one major thing that is happening that I think we’ll have some trouble getting trough to the community is that Microsoft Office Systems 2007 (Client and Server) is more than just a few products, such as word, excel and SharePoint on the server side. Microsoft Office Systems 2007 is actually more of an Application Platform than anything else! Yeah, you read me right! I think in time we’ll see a lot of solutions built on this platform that don’t not just handle document editing and workflows and stuff like that, but actually going to use office for interacting with LOB applications. Going to bed now, but I’ll try to elaborate more on this topic further on.