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

During a meeting at the summit, Capossela made the case that Office, with its familiar interface, is the best way to handle even sensitive documents. It just needs to be updated to deal with new procedures for ensuring that documents are locked down when they need to be.

"It's got to be managed in a certain way," Capossela said. "You don't get to do whatever you want — you don't get to save it on your hard drive; you don't get to email it around."

But one of the CEOs in the room, Bob Greifeld of the Nasdaq stock exchange, noted that it's hard to always know which documents need the extra-sensitive treatment. He pointed to a recent example where Nasdaq could have gotten in trouble with regulators because it had only the latest version of its financial models related to an acquisition.

"That's where an Excel (type program) is not ideal because of its unstructured nature," Greifeld said.

Capossela said things will change when Microsoft introduces Office 12, the next release of its productivity suite, in the second half of next year.

The company has not said exactly how it will lock down documents, but it has said that is a goal. Microsoft has been widely expected to introduce new server products in conjunction with Office 12.

Though the increased regulation poses some challenges to the way parts of Microsoft's Information Worker unit have been doing business, in other areas the company feels like it's getting a boost.

With instant messaging (IM), for example, Microsoft is trying to take advantage of the fact that in many industries companies have had to stop using the technology because of regulatory concerns. In that area, Microsoft has introduced its Live Communication Server, which lets workers share information with company colleagues as well as send instant messages to outsiders using AOL, Yahoo and MSN IM services. The key driver for companies, though, is that the server takes what had been a rogue technology and brings it under the purview of a company's IT department.

"IM — the reason it popped up, even though email is there, is because it satisfied a certain user need in terms of a dynamic communication channel, kind of a sideband, a little walkie-talkie between the users, and it satisfied their needs," said Lotus Notes founder Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft after it purchased his company, Groove Networks. "And then that centralised logging (found in Live Communication Server) satisfied the organisation's needs."