Microsoft is to further delay the launch of Office 2007
and will no longer develop WinFS, a technology designed to improve
filing and searching documents on Windows Vista and
Longhorn.
A company spokesman said the Office delay followed internal
testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance.
The development schedule has been revised, with planned
deployment pushed back from the end of 2006 to early 2007.
"Feedback on quality and performance will ultimately determine the
exact dates," said the spokesman.
Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said this
could hit some organisations that took out Software Assurance
licensing agreements towards the end of 2003 expecting to get the
right to deploy an updated version of Office during the three-year
licence.
Ollie Ross, head of research at the Corporate IT Forum, said it
would particularly hit users planning to use Office 2007's business
intelligence tools. "At a time when data management is a priority
for both business and IT, this hesitancy is particularly
disappointing from the development perspective," she said.
Darren Strange, senior product manager at Microsoft, said,
"There will be some customers affected and with our partners we
will be working directly with them."
The decision not to develop WinFS as part of Longhorn, the
next-generation Microsoft operating system, means that users will
need to buy additional software to get the promised
functionality.
Microsoft said, "We are changing the delivery strategy for WinFS
technologies and it will not ship as a standalone feature. However,
the vision for integrated storage is alive and well. Microsoft will
instead include the WinFS support for unstructured data and
auto-admin work and deliver features in the next release of MS SQL
Server, codenamed Katmai, as part of its Data Platform Vision
strategy."
WinFS was one of the three major components of the next Windows
release, and focused on enterprise data access. Forrester Research
vice-president Mike Gilpin said, "We were hoping WinFS would be
delivered after Vista's launch, as it would enable applications to
share content without being rewritten."
The technology could have been applied in applications such as a
call centre at an insurance firm, where staff could have used a
single application to access customer records along with faxes of
claims forms and digital photos backing claims.
Though such integration is possible with middleware, Gilpin said
data integration without WinFS would be complex, costly and need
constant maintenance when data formats in applications change.