The new UI for Office 12 is very cool.  I have maintained for years that most people haven’t needed any of the new features of Office since Office 97.  The one exception to that has been Outlook, however quite a few people don’t even use that as they use something integrated with their browser or some type of webmail (Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.).

Finally, Microsoft has given us a reason to upgrade.  Office 12 looks like a suite that people can actually be more productive with at doing the things they already do.  The UI is revolutionary and as Office typically leads the way for look and feel for Windows apps, expect your new apps to look quite a bit different.

I guess I would describe the new UI as having a tabbed toolbar.  You have a very advanced toolbar at the top of your application with what appears to be a standard menu bar above it. However, if you select the “Layout” menu, your toolbar changes to be all related to layout items.  It’s very quick and intuitive on how to easily get to the things you need to do.

PDC attendees will receive Beta 1 when it ships, so that’s cool, too.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how I can get the most out of this suite.

I’m very thrilled that the next version of SharePoint will have RSS capability built-in.  Also, Outlook will have an RSS feed reader.  Interesting that people have been screaming about USENET feeds in Outlook since version 1, and it STILL isn’t in there, but MS worked to get RSS in ASAP.  I’m glad, but will it be as good as NewsGator, which is what I use now?  I’ll find out.  And if you can post with it, will you only be able to post to an “Office” or “SharePoint” server, or will it understand the WordPress API, for example?   These are the questions burning in my mind at the moment.