Even though an increasing number of teams at Microsoft appear to become shying absent from christening their fledgling products with excellent,
Office 2007 Professional, old-fashioned code names – favoring the ever-so-boring “V.Next” designation instead — there are still some who are doing so.
Microsoft code names always have piqued my interest. They offer some wonderful clues about the Redmondians’ development priorities,
Office 2007 Enterprise, not to mention a better understanding of which future Microsoft products fit together, from a strategy standpoint.
Microsoft
code name
of the day:
Magnesium
In honor of Microsoft code-name junkies everywhere, I’m going to feature one,
Microsoft Office Professional 2010, random Microsoft code name per work day for the rest of this month. I’ll provide as much information as I’ve been able to unearth on each, and attempt to provide some context as to how the team chose the name and how the forthcoming technology fits into the Redmond product hierarchy.
Microsoft code name of the day: Magnesium
Best guess on what it is: The next version of Office for Mac (also known as Office 12)
Meaning/context of the code name: "Magnesium" is an interesting choice for the Mac Business Unit. Until now, the Microsoft group that favored metallic code names was the Exchange Server team. (Anyone else remember Exchange Platinum, Mercury and Titanium?)
Back story: It seemed the perfect time to mention the next version of Office for Mac — despite the fact that it isn't expected to ship until Q2/Q3 of 2007 — given the flap earlier this week over file-format incompatibilities between
Office 2007 and existing versions of Office for Mac. (Just to recap,
Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft revealed at the end of the day yesterday a "late March/early April" planned availability date for a beta version of the promised converters that will enable Windows-based
Office 2007 users to share documents using the new
Office 2007 formats.)
Additional info: What do we know so far about Magnesium? APC Magazine got some superior details a couple of months back. Expect Magnesium to sport some kind of Mac adaptation of the
Office 2007 Ribbon user interface. And it sounds like the new release will get the same new "Open XML" file formats that
Office 2007 includes as defaults. Microsoft is planning on dropping three beta versions of Magnesium (though no large-scale public ones, like they did with
Office 2007) before releasing the product later next year.
Anyone have any other details on Magnesium to share? Or have another Microsoft code name you’ve been wondering about? Send it my way and I’ll do my best to track down some leads on what it might be.
And if you want to keep track of the full month's worth of Microsoft code names I end up posting,
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, bookmark this "Microsoft Codenames" page.