Office 2010 No vertically-focused Microsoft Office

A report in Advertising Age earlier this week, entitled “Microsoft to Create ‘Office Suite; for Marketing,” had me wondering whether Microsoft had decided to pursue a strategy I first heard about years ago: Creating customized versions of Office for specific vertical markets.According to Ad Age, Microsoft and Mediabrands are collaborating on a new suite, which Mediabrands is calling the Media Operations Management System (MOMS). Ad Age quoted Quentin George, chief digital officer at Mediabrands, as saying: “‘We haven;t had the Office Suite, a productivity suite,Office 2010 Pro Plus, for advertising and marketing; that fits marketing-management systems into a larger intelligent platform.”Maybe Office for Advertising was just the first in a possible long line of customized Office SKUs, I thought. Could Office for Healthcare, Office for Utilities, Office for Insurance and other vertically-focused Microsoft Office software — plus services, of course — be far behind?For now, the answer is no. A Microsoft Office spokesperson whom I contacted this week said Microsoft is not building an Office for Marketing SKU.My next guess: Maybe this MOMS thing is actually the Office for Sales SKU I blogged about previously this year. Microsoft officials never confirmed that the Office for Sales SKU existed, but my Office 14 tester sources did. I;ve heard more recently,Office Professional 2007 Key, however, that Microsoft has scrapped plans — at least for the time being — to field this product. That means when Office 2010 ships, there won;t be an Office 2010 for Sales, after all. The Microsoft spokesperson still wouldn;t confirm or deny Office for Sales; existence, but did say that the MOMS platform was not an Office for Sales SKU from Microsoft.So what the heck is this “Office Suite for Advertising”? I tried contacting Mediabrands to ask but got no word back. I also tried Microsoft;s Digital Advertising unit. A spokesperson there sent me this architectural diagram of MOMS (click on it to enlarge):
From this, it looks like MOMS is a customized back-end ad system built on top of (or at least interfacing with) Microsoft adCenter. The list of MOMS features and capabilities from the press release from Mediabrands (data-driven decisioning, workflow management, advanced analytics) make it sound like there;s probably a good dose of SharePoint Server and Microsoft business-intelligence software (SQL Server,Office 2007 Enterprise Key, Excel, PerformancePoint,Office 2010 Keygen, Master Data Services, etc.) inside MOMS, too.So after a week of chasing down false leads, it looks like Office 2010 will be the same horizontal,Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, all-purpose suite that Office always has been. And this “Office for Advertising” platform is probably nothing more than a Microsoft Consulting-Mediaworks custom project. If I hear any more, I;ll update this post.