Where Have I Gone?

I know in my last post I said that I'd be gone for a few days… and now those few days have stretched into a few weeks.

One of the reasons I've been off the blog for a while is that we've been extremely busy putting the final touches on Office 2007. Now is the time when every bug needs to be tracked down and squashed with utmost priority. And with Windows Vista also in the home stretch, there's a lot going on around here.

I've also been fortunate to spend much of the last month traveling around the world and here within the United States, talking to customers and the press about Office 2007. Last week I was in Singapore talking to folks from all around Asia; it was fun to show an almost-finished Office 2007 to a group of people to whom the new UI was totally unknown. I always seem to learn something from people who are seeing the new interface for the first time; it's why we put so much of an emphasis throughout the design process in soliciting fresh perspectives.

Now I'm finally back in Seattle for a while, so I will be writing regularly again.

For you developers out there, later in the week I'll post the final Office 2007 schema for Ribbon development which you can use to author solutions which will work with the RTM version. Happily, very little modification will be required to move solutions forward which you author against B2TR.