While Office 12, Microsoft's next-generation desktop suite, is not expected to hit Beta 1 until later this fall, Microsoft officials are set to show off a number of its components at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in mid-September.

Recent PDCs have focused almost exclusively on operating system and tools futures. But this year's will include tens of tracks aimed at Office developers and users.

At the conference, Microsoft officials are set to show off some of the individual Office 12 desktop applications; InfoPath and Excel server capabilities; SharePoint "Version 3" futures; and new functionality on the Groove collaboration front. Company officials are expected to outline Microsoft's updated enterprise-content-management strategy at the confab. And Senior Vice President of Office, Steven Sinofsky, is slated to deliver the September 14 PDC keynote.

Microsoft is expected to emphasize Office 12's role not just as a family of products for customers, but also as a foundational platform for developers.

"I think the Information Worker group is serious about trying to get developers to use Office 12 as a platform, and they are continuing to invest a good deal of developer time and money for that goal," said Rob Helm, director of research with Directions on Microsoft. "They are getting traction: Winning SAP for the Mendocino project was a major coup. The 2005-2006 wave of Office developer releases are all going to make significant improvements."

Microsoft has its challenges on this front, Helm admitted. "The catch, I believe is that Information Worker (division) might be investing too much in developer platforms. Namely, there might be too many different Office developer platforms."

Helm cites as examples Microsoft's Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), the Office Task Pane and Smart Tag/Windows Forms application programming interfaces (APIs) and the Microsoft Information Bridge Framework technology, among other Office-development tools that Microsoft is touting.

Plus, "Office isn't the only game in town for developers. On forms, for example, developers could also use straight Windows Forms, ASP.NET Web Forms, or the new Windows Presentation Framework forms technology coming in Windows Vista," Helm said.

"I think the Information Worker unit has to explain to Office developers how to make long-term platform choices, by explaining how Office developer platforms are going to eventually converge with one another, and with the other developer platforms at Microsoft," Helm continued. "Until that's explained, it's going to be difficult for developers to justify Office development for strategic applications that they expect to stick around for some time.

Based on a list of Office-related sessions scheduled for the PDC, Microsoft officials are going to try to shed some light on Microsoft's myriad Office development tools. Tips for customizing Office 12's user interface are high on the agenda, as are ways to program using the aforementioned XML file formats, to which Microsoft is referring as the "Microsoft Open XML Formats."

Microsoft also is expected to use the confab to share its vision for some of its new Office 12 server products. Earlier this year, partners said Microsoft was planning to release new Excel, InfoPath and possibly other Office 12 servers in 2006.

Rather than being written from the ground up as completely new products, the new Office 12 servers seem more likely to consist of a combination of some new interfaces, plus existing technologies. Microsoft is working on a family of so-called Office 12 SharePoint Servers that will rely on Windows SharePoint Services on the back end, and new Office 12 Web services APIs on the front end, based on hints from its PDC session agenda.

For example, Microsoft is slated to demonstrate at the PDC how to use what it's calling "Excel Services" to store and retrieve spreadsheets running on a server. Users will be view the Excel data in a variety of ways via customized user interfaces.

Microsoft is set to show off a similar scenario on the InfoPath front. Users will be able to access and store electronic forms via a SharePoint server on the back end and view them from inside an application or even a Web browser. Microsoft officials demonstrated this type of InfoPath server capability publicly a couple of times earlier this year, but declined to offer specifics on how it planned to deliver the capability to market.

Microsoft also will highlight at the PDC how to combine new Access 12 database capabilities with SharePoint. With Access 12, developers will be able to build Access-based applications that can store their data in SharePoint sites, collect data through InfoPath and Outlook and "take advantage of new services from 'Office 12' SharePoint Servers," according to the PDC agenda.

SharePoint is definitely the crux of Microsoft's vision for its Office System 12 family of products. According a posting by Microsoft senior consultant Mark Bower, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently took on the role as the lead product manager on the Windows SharePoint Services Version 3 User Experience team.

Microsoft officials continue to decline to discuss specifics about Office 12. Officials have said to expect the final version of Office 12 to ship in the latter half of 2006. They also have revealed that XML-based file formats will be the default in Office 12.

Company officials also have acknowledged they are developing Office 12 independently of the Windows Vista client and Longhorn Server, Microsoft's next Windows releases, due out in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Microsoft has said it intends to enable Office 12 products to run on Windows XP and Windows 2000 on the desktop, and Windows Server 2003 on the server.