Raikes details Office changes
eWeek | at | by Mike
As Microsoft Corp. prepares to release the first beta for Office 11, the next version of its pervasive Office productivity suite, Jeff Raikes, its group vice president of productivity and business services, sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli at the company's Mountain View, Calif., campus to talk about the changes users can expect to see.
eWEEK: You have identified the business intelligence arena as an area of huge opportunity for Office. Can you be more specific about your plans in that regard?
Raikes: The challenge today with business intelligence is that it frequently ends up being the domain of a few people inside the organization. My view in part is that there's a big opportunity to make business intelligence more accessible, and one of the key ways to do that is to make it much more connected into the Office tools people are already using. So, if I can go from a SharePoint Portal site to look at a scorecard that leads me into an Excel solution that connects to Data Analyzer and then am able to e-mail this off to my sales team, then I've really opened up business intelligence to something that's more accessible. Our goal is not to cannibalize the business of companies in business intelligence today; our goal is to help business intelligence become more accessible. The way to do that is to get the Office tools connected to the systems that represent that information.