In a post titled: “Reasons to be cheerful about Office 12?”, the normally cynical El Reg has some nice things to say about the new productivity suite from Microsoft, due out later this year.

In particular it praises the collaboration tools embedded in the software:

O12 aims to change that. The level of collaboration between users of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be raised to a new level. That is because all the sharing of templates, libraries etc. will be done via Microsoft’s Sharepoint Portal server. Another cost for businesses (or opportunity for resellers) perhaps, but on the plus side, Sharepoint is already widely used. Over the last few years it has established a clear lead and the only vendor keeping up with it is IBM, the independent portal companies all now having disappeared.

A second area of good cheer is Business Intelligence (BI). “O12 aims to democratise BI by making it available to the masses at low cost.”

So far, so good. Has The Register made some New Year resolutions?

There’s even more to come: “So, perhaps O12 should not be dismissed as just another upgrade, but, at least in two areas discussed above, a quantum leap forward by Microsoft in enabling the humble worker.”

Read the whole article.