There's been a lot of confusion of late regarding what we can and cannot write about regarding Office 12. Check out Ed Bott's Feb 4th entry, along with comments. Clarification soon came from Microsoft's top blogger and world-renowned MS technical evangelist Robert Scoble:
"Press (which include bloggers) are allowed to write about client apps - specifically Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Visio, Project, OneNote and InfoPath. Products still under NDA include Groove and all our server products."
That's referring to Groove 12, of course. So, while I cannot reveal certain things about the changes coming for Groove users - yet; I'll do my best to keep you on top of things in the Collaboration development world in general.
I can tell you that the mindset at Redmond has been seriously adjusted in favor of collaboration, thanks in part to Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie, who is also Groove's founder and the man who created Lotus Notes. The adoption of open XMLfile formats in Office 12 products will open the door to independent developers creating add-ons for all of the Office 12 products (including Groove), as well as Windows Vista. This, to me, is the truly exciting part.
