How does the Microsoft Office team speed up the pace

Computer store news: US IT website CNET today wrote that in order to adapt to the ever-changing development trend of the technology industry, Microsoft is shortening the development cycle of Office through department restructuring and adjustment development process to provide users with the best service. However, in the process, it is still necessary to avoid the enterprise users being at a loss because of the speed.

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In the past ten years, Microsoft Office has been operating very regularly, almost as accurate as a clock: every two and a half or three years, The 5,000-person R&D team will launch a new version of Office, which is never a good deal.

But now, the two- or three-year upgrade cycle will be treated as an antique. Although the on-time release is commendable, the upgrade speed needs to be accelerated. In addition, in today's era, a wide variety of Office clients, servers, and services do not have to follow the exact same upgrade cycle.

The Microsoft Office team is clearly aware of this reality. It is reported that the team will launch the first upgrade of Office 2013 this fall — — development of Office Blue codenamed Gemini. If this is true, the release of Office 2013, the company's latest generation of client products, will be separated by a full year. But before that, Office also plans to update the subscription version of Office client and server products in June or 7 with some new features.

Many users and developers are skeptical about whether Microsoft can successfully implement this ambitious plan. Can a large team like Office complete such a development task in such a short period of time?

Microsoft executives said the company has quietly planned a faster product upgrade and update cycle months or even years ago. Jeff Tedor, vice president of the company's Office Server and Services division, said: "We have been preparing for this cyclical change for two years. & rdquo;

In order to implement this change, they have deployed new management, planning and technical processes.

In the past, everyone on the Office team followed the same plan. Tepper said that there are three important stages within Office, followed by three Office betas before the new version will be released. He pointed out that they have changed the rhythm. For example, the exact date of the RTM version of Office 2013 (October 11, 2012) was determined two years ago.

But now, different teams within the Office team follow a different schedule. While the release dates for interdependent products such as Outlook and Exchange may be interrelated, other teams are no longer aligned. For example, Office RT and Exchange's anti-spam department do not need to follow the exact same development plan.

Despite this, Microsoft reorganized Office 365 and the service team so that Exchange Online and SharePoint Online can be designed and developed together.

& ldquo;We now look at Exchange, SharePoint and Yammer as a product. “Temper said, “This can greatly speed up decision making. "Temper also said that the Office team is expected to launch a number of new features in this June or July — — some are Office's own features, and some are for Windows Azure, Dynamics and Windows Intune establishes a connection. Although he will not disclose the details, in the future update, Yammer may be integrated into SharePoint.

Challenge: Don't be too fast and don't be too slow

In the process of changing the product development cycle, a major challenge for Office and other Microsoft departments is that business users are used to the original The frequency of upgrades and the development of targeted procurement and upgrade plans. Therefore, if Microsoft's product team is too fast, it may cause users to be at a loss.

 One part of our challenge is that consumers and IT departments cannot digest new technologies in the short term. “Temper said, “This is why people skip some new products and upgrade them every two or three generations of Office or Exchange. & rdquo;

With cloud computing, users can enjoy new features faster. When Microsoft launched Office 365 in June 2011, its network services were still working to improve functionality and add features that were integrated into SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync as early as 2010. Microsoft accelerated its speed when developing Office 2013, while adding functionality to servers and cloud services.

But the team plans to roll out new features for the cloud computing version of Office and Office servers in the future, and then release them to the local version of Office clients and servers. Although they also plan to speed up the update of the local version of the software, there is no public release schedule yet.

Teppel said that the public promise is that Office services will be released before the Office server, "some features may only be used in the service. ”

“We have to walk in front of the customer, not behind. Cloud computing can provide the best experience for users. & rdquo;Temper added. Microsoft believes that companies that are not prepared for shorter upgrades and update cycles, or those that do not want to upgrade frequently, will continue to use the local versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office.

In fact, the actual implementation of the Office team is better than the effect they promoted. Although the company has not been widely publicized, it has indeed been able to update the Office service every quarter or even every month. Tepel said they want to keep a low profile in order to win more time to strengthen their cloud computing development.

Both Exchange and SharePoint are now a team, both local and online. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft plans to keep the local and online versions of these services in step. He said that for most business users, launching new server software every quarter is neither feasible nor business-friendly. Many enterprise users are not even sure if they want Microsoft to include new features in the patch packages for these products, or even just make some corrections.

So far, the Office team plans to continue to maintain the frequency of launching an Office server patch package for at least a year. These patches will contain a small amount of new features or even new features. Cumulative updates to Office servers will also be released every two months and will not include any new features.

Yammer: It’s not fast enough to update once a quarter

While the Office team is trying to avoid alienating corporate users because of the fast update speed, the Yammer team is exerting influence on Office on the other hand. To make it more flexible.

When Microsoft acquired Yammer, a corporate social networking provider, in June 2012, it initially planned to let Yammer run independently and be separated from Office. “At the time of the acquisition, many people thought that we needed to remain independent. But after we started to contact the Office team, we found that we are all moving towards a product. ” Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam · Adam Pisoni said.

& ldquo; The timing of our participation in Microsoft is perfect, the team's concept is very open. & rdquo; Pisoni added. The Office team was concentrating on developing Wave 15/Office 2013 products, and was thinking deeply about how to speed up development and maintain scale.

Although the Office team plans to update the cloud service once a month, the Yammer team believes that it should speed up. “ You should speed up for some users. Sometimes it even needs to be updated once a week. & rdquo; Pisoni said.