Copyright
I'm dead chuffed how you managed to get permission so easily for the title image.
I've tried before to get a similar but, alas, failed.
Microsoft has shed light on next year's preview of Office 2019, talking up the new productivity suite as a boon for those who may prefer to work outside of the cloud. The Redmond giant says the first builds of Office 2019 will arrive in the back half of 2018. It will be considered the first major "perpetual release" version ( …
Believe that if one dislikes, distrusts, finds practical fault with, has negative user experience with, or doesn't have practical business use for a particular technology, than one must be "scared" of it. As in, "scared of the cloud".
Also let's just take a census of the people in this building who are actually excited for new Powerpoint animations and then write a policy forbidding them to ever give presentations or lectures.
It will be a coolish day in Hell before we begin storing our Office stuff on anyone else's computers.
Apart from losing control of some very valuable information (formulas for various very valuable products being an example), we prefer to have control over where data is, and who has access to it.
Not scared, just cautious.
Also let's just take a census of the people in this building who are actually excited for new Powerpoint animations and then write a policy forbidding them to ever give presentations or lectures.
You're being too gentle; nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure ->
can it get worse than 'clippy' ?
/me mentions obligatory clip from 'Salmon Days' regarding BOFH vs Clippy... "I'm NOT! WRITING! a F'ING! LETTER!, you STUPID! F'ING! PAPERCLIP!!!"
[if you've seen the video clip, you'll also know how to properly interpret the capitalization and punctuation]
Outlook will probably only get a small GUI face lift, and nothing that people have been requesting for years. One example would be having a signature per "Send As...".
Exchange upgrade from 2010 to 2013 (from a multi-tenant deployment) has shown to make things worse. Trying to force SharePoint on people by trying to take away share folders has been a bitter point. Who like SharePoint?
"external then I'd put my LinkedIn profile link instead."
I'd just take some random words strung together to appear in the form of a sentence. "Bat intestine repossesses sinking horse thought" or similar
otherwise, sigs are pointless, except in USENET or blogs
"..I'd like an intelligent signature function, ie if the email is being sent internally then I'd put my phone number and link to the SharePoint "mysite", external then I'd put my LinkedIn profile link instead..."
Pretty sure you can (or could, at least) use transport rules to achieve this. Not graceful, but do-able.
Now...give me a version of Skype for Business where I can add multiple accounts / logins please, such as I can with frigging Outlook.
I implemented those using the stock E2010/2013 interface to insert a sig block in everyone's mail- what was supposed to be a quick n simple task turned into a multi-month debacle and a lot of pain and suffering for me from our user base. (some of which howled rather loudly that we were forcing a standardized signature on them)
I think it is just a product differentiation from its cloud/vapour ware preferred item.
Also they would really rather we forget about all previous versions. You remember them. Announced as world shakingly wonderful when they come out but when the next one appears, the older version is vile, shoddy and unreliable.
At £119 for Office Home, it's looking expensive. Apple's iWork is free (though granted it's not nearly as powerful); LibreOffice provides maybe 80% of the same features & quality for free.
The old Microsoft Works was just £40. Microsoft desperately need something at that price point to hook new users in; otherwise they don't have that valuable chain of users migrating from Works to full-blown Office as their needs expand.
LibreOffice provides maybe 80% of the same features & quality for free
Agree that LO works well, but it's just so...damn...ugly. The ribbon, with all those chunky and out-of-proportion icons, looks like something from Baby's First Word Processor. I'm not someone who obsesses over the finer points of design, but LO makes my eyes hurt.
I'm not going to defend the quality of Open / Libre Office here, and I've lost track of which one is better on any given day of the week.
But if you read non-techie forums such as Mumsnet, people are actively recommending (Libre|Free)Office for home users. By pricing out those home users, Microsoft will lose valuable feeder users who both build brand loyalty and who may eventually graduate to full-blown Office.
"Agree that LO works well, but it's just so...damn...ugly. The ribbon, with all those chunky and out-of-proportion icons, looks like something from Baby's First Word Processor. I'm not someone who obsesses over the finer points of design, but LO makes my eyes hurt."
You can change the icon set in LO really easily. I didn't like the default set either, and at first that made me gravitate toward OO instead, but given that OO seems to be at death's door, I decided to try LO again, and I soon found I could fix the icon issue, not to mention the poor choice of default (blindingly bright) colors.
Also: Ribbon? LO has a ribbon?
Why?
Everybody now knows that "the cloud" is just other people's computers i.e. they and the gov't are going though your stuff and reading your communications. Sort of like calling ISIS "the light", or a communist gov't "democratic".
So, yeah, I'd consider Office 2019. And while they're on the roll, how about a non-cloud version of Windows Professional?
MS, I don't want your cloud. I don't even want your user interface. I just want to be able to save a "Word" document in LibreOffice and have a colleague using MS Office actually see it the way that I wrote it. I'll even pay an MS tax for this "feature". Come on. Twenty bucks for an official plugin from MS that makes File->Save actually work "right". (And by "right", I mean reproduces all known MS file format bugs in correct order to duplicate Word's results.) I have money! I just have no interest in, well, pretty much anything that you sell, especially if it involves anything that you claim makes it "better" than the previous version. Come on MS. Just meet me half way. Please!
The problem is that people insist on sharing files using .doc/.docx (and similar for the other components), which are crappy formats for file sharing (include significant information about the systems where the files are used, and poorly to not documented, to name just two of their problems). Sharing Office files is problematic, even if you do stick with Office. I do not want to use Office (buggy, bloated, bad UI), but if the sharing fails, and I don't use Office, it's MY fault. If I stick to Office (despite the fact that I struggle and have to invest twice of my time to do the same tasks, to not mention the fact that I have to pay a LOT of money to legally use it compared to other software), and sharing fails, it's Microsoft's fault.
I wish people would stop requiring Office files altogether, and use proper, system-agnostic document files. OpenOffice file formats would be a first recommendation – at least they're properly documented, and reasonably system-information free. One do not even have to use Open-/LibreOffice to work with them.