If you listen to Microsoft's marketing machine you'll hear that the forthcoming Office 12 or 2007 is a neccessary upgrade for hungry power users such as myself. I'm told I need the upgraded features and the new UI layouts will make me even more productive. Microsoft used to be right and I used to believe them. Their Office software is great but is quickly running out of steam.

Here's why...

I spend my day interacting with fellow colleagues in our offices and Glasgow and increasingly in Boston too. Together we work on projects that span the globe. We're all power users because we're a technically minded IT company that uses IT all day to do what we do, i.e. develop software and take it to market. We're not in agriculture or manufacturing or even a services business such as selling insurance. We're a software company and therefore... power users.

We're currently in the process of outsourcing our email servers to an email hosting company. This process involves coordinating the movement of mailboxes from two locations to our hosting partner's servers, across timezones 5 hours apart.

The one piece of software which makes this whole process easy is Google spreadsheets. We've got a sheet set up with each row corresponding to a staff member or mailbox, whereby the columns represent that mailbox's different stages throughout the migration. Something that you can do in Excel today. But with a twist, we're currently able to edit those details in real time. Four members of staff are editing these details continuously. There's no sending of "updated spreadsheets", no versioning, no conflicts. It works seamlessly, to the point that we can invite the support staff from the hosting partner into "gang of four" and have them involved in the migration.

One spreadsheet. 5 authors. Realtime. 2 timezones. 3 locations.... a scenario that will happen with increasing frequency.