Locking, logging and linking: What's coming in Office 12

For most of their 20 years, Word and Excel documents have had free rein within corporate walls.

In the early days, workers used an array of floppy disks to shuttle documents created with the programs from department to department. Email let the files become even more far-flung, easily moving them among branch offices around the globe.

But with the advent of federal record-keeping regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which impose strict rules on how companies manage and archive information, those freewheeling days are nearly at an end.

That's a big deal to Microsoft, which wants to make sure that however the rules change, businesses are still using Excel (and Word and PowerPoint) for their computerised files.

"We know that we've got an opportunity to provide IT the types of controls that they need for this concept that we call the 'million dollar document,' which is one of those documents or spreadsheets that [contain] a million dollars or more worth of [intellectual property]," Chris Capossela, a corporate vice-president in Microsoft's Information Worker unit, said during a meeting at a recent company-sponsored CEO summit in Redmond, Washington. "Those have got be something that IT could control. But we still want people using Excel to be able to build them."

With the next version of Office, Microsoft plans to let businesses set rules, enforced by server-based software, to determine how those documents are handled. The shift is just one of several trends the software giant is labelling part of a "new world of work" that its next generation Office software will address. But at the same time that Microsoft is saying it understands the shifting tides, it's trying to make sure it doesn't miss any undercurrents.

Along with its long-standing research efforts, the company has stepped up its efforts to look at how different people are working, across industries and geographic boundaries as well as in different age groups. Last year, the company flew in about a dozen recent school and university leavers from across the globe to its headquarters in Redmond. At last week's CEO summit, Microsoft gathered to discuss its vision for the future of work with a more traditional crowd: a pair of chief executives, along with Tom Austin, a fellow at researcher Gartner.