Featuring: Darren Strange Darren Strange on Office 2007 At the MVP open day Richard interviews Darren Strange - UK Product Manager for Office 2007 and get his views on some of the changes in Office 2007   [Transcript] I'm Darren Strange, the UK product manager for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. We are launching the 2007 release in January 2007 together with Windows Vista and in the run up to that I'll be talking about what's new and why it is significant in the evolution of Microsoft Office. A bit about me then. My job has two parts to it - an evangelist for the product and a project manager for the launch project. The evangelist part means I do lots of presentations on Office and am the lead spokesperson in the UK on Information Worker matters. I work with customers, partners, analysts and press to better understand the opportunities for Office and help people to understand and get value from it. The project management part is running a pretty complex, multi-workstream project which covers each segment, audience and department involved in the launch. I take a special interest in the rapid deployment customers and in the press and analyst outreach. Wherever possible, we are using the 2007 release to run the project using SharePoint Server, Groove, Project Server, InfoPath, Excel and PowerPoint in our project office processes. This means I am hopefully "walking the talk" as we march towards launch. My background is in Microsoft Consulting Services where I started as an Exchange consultant back in 1997 and later got to manage the collaboration team and then the solutions practice. This comprised of three consulting teams; collaboration, Internet business and SQL & Business Intelligence. Before that I worked for KPMG Management Consulting for 4 years which my first job out of university. Last year I passed my PMI and this year my CIM professional diploma. I won't be doing any more exams for a while now.. http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker