In an InfoWorld interview, Microsoft’s Jeff Raikes outlines the future role of Office. Raikes is group vice president of Productivity and Business Services. He says:
If you step back and look at the Windows server, what’s valuable from a knowledge worker or information worker standpoint? Historically, the Windows server, or previously the Novell server, was all about file and print services. It was about how to share resources for the knowledge worker, for the information worker. What SharePoint Team Services does is it builds on that concept, taking it to the next logical step.
So what we’re doing with the .Net servers is we’re going to be integrating the SharePoint Team Services capability as a foundation for this kind of collaborative routine work. For example, with Office 11 look at what it can do for things like meetings. Meetings today are relatively underserved in terms of software technology. I mean there [are] a lot of things you need to do in terms of preparing for a meeting — how you set the agenda, how you share the documents, and all of that. Now you can make that fundamentally a part of the Office client world. Today, take [for example] a document where you have a set of people collaborating. It’s reasonably effective to send it around in e-mail; that’s common for people to do. But especially in an environment like InfoWorld, I would think it would be nice if you just posted the documents that you’re working on — at least [a document you’re] collaboratively working on — right there on the SharePoint Team Services site.
He talks quite a lot in the interview about SharePoint Team Services and Groove (in the context of collaboration) – maybe we need to take a closer look at both in more detail.
