So it's official it is "Office 2007"

The part that I have been itching to talk about... Is the unveiling of Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer. Yeah I know I've talked about Expression Web Developer (EWD) quite a bit now... but what I haven't done is compare EWD to Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. For those of you that have been enrolled in the early beta of Office you will have noticed a mix between the use of the term Frontpage and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. This is because Frontpage is being replaced!

Both EWD and SharePoint Designer share a core code base that is based on FrontPage but IMHO improves the experience ten-fold! I have been experimenting with early betas of both these technologies and I just love the way that when you do something in WYSIWYG HTML editor it creates a style sheet and references it in the HTML... Now you purest css designers will be cringing.. you can stop reading now and remix mix instead.

I got used to the grouping style using the WYSIWYG HTML editor pretty quickly... e.g. first time I changed font... colour... size etc it created a style and next time I wanted to apply this style it was very easy to highlight the text and apply the style that was automatically created last time I perform the action.

Microsoft has been doing great work continuing their support for standards with commitments to Web Standards in IE, WASP, the Open XML Submission to Ecma, XHTML Compliance in ASP.NET Whidbey and also Windows Communication Foundation. I see yesterdays announcement of Microsoft's next generation of web authoring and design tools as a continuation along this path.

So why two products you ask?

Microsoft has built SharePoint Designer 2007 for information workers (IW) that are creating and customising Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications inside of Windows SharePoint Services. I tried this out when I was in Seattle in January... I liked how this worked for basic IW workflows (such as document approval) using absolutely no-code. This process is wizard based and a visualization of the workflow is available at the end of the process. The workflow is automatically deployed to Windows SharePoint Services and can be stepped through and debugged. More complicated workflow scenarios will require using the WF framework directly in Visual Studio 2005 or writing activities in VS that can be used by a IW worker in SharePoint Designer 2007.

To address profession web designers Microsoft has created Expression Web Designer. EWD is focused on building high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides exceptional support for integrating XML, CSS, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML and other standard Web technologies into sites to make them more dynamic, interactive and accessible. Teams of designers using Expression Web Designer and developers using Microsoft Visual Studio will benefit from numerous integrated features that allow them to collaborate on the design and development of content and applications.

What else came out in the Office 2007 announcements?

The press release is here with details on the various packages (SKUs) to be offered, and the estimated retail pricing.

Also I love what I have seen of the new Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 . Before I worked at Microsoft I built a "proof of concept" project that took the "xml" contained within an InfoPath form and creating a browser based ASP.NET front-end and then used the Web Service API component of the BizTalk Server Adapter for Sharepoint to store the results in a form list as an InfoPath form. This was great because it enabled you to expose your forms to users over the Internet that didn't have the InfoPath client installed. Once the results were received and stored inside SharePoint they were back in an InfoPath format that could be easily processed by a workflow server such BizTalk. Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 enables this functionality out of the box and takes it a few steps further with cross-browser AJAX and Mobile support watch the web cast from PDC to learn more... design-once-run-everywhere is the key here.

This stuff is fantastic for anyone that works with Microsoft technology and the web... if you haven't seen it yet check out Seventeen Minutes will Bill to learn more!

Tags: Office 2007, Expression Web Developer, SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007, Office 12

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