In these days I had an internal discussion about the new Office 12
user interface (I've talked about it on a previous post some days
ago) and more than someone has expressed me a doubt: will the new user interface
more easy to use or not?
The new interface is not only a look changement, but it's essentially a new
changement in functionality. Now if you want to look
through a functionality on every Office product, you need to look
through different levels of hierarchical menus, but the concept of "menus"
where you can find a functionality will disappear.
Now the new concept to undertand is the concept of "Ribbon". As
explained by Jensen Harris (from the
Office UI Team) the Ribbon is a strip across the top of the window
that exposes what the program can do.
The Ribbon is a new generation type of menus, totally
customizable by the end user. It can be reduced, collapsed, increased, you can
add functionality on it and is extremely more easy and quick to find the
functionality you want. Read the Jensen's post and you'll learn more about this
new concept.
This is extremely new and it's obvious that (at this early
stage, where the new UI is only a preview for all) there are people that
are not so sure about its friendly usability, but I'm sure that the
Ribbon will be a success.
Now I want to launch to the Office Team a message of what I think
it's a big needs for the future for our developers: when we'll have a .NET
control to write Ribbons on our applications?
Building applications with a look similar (or equal) to the Office
products is more frequently a need that we have. Our customers asks for that and
lots of time we don't have the graphic tools to do that. Today if I want to
write an application with the Office 2003 look I've to do really an hard work by
myself or I've to buy some third party controls... not good! 
We need built-in tools to do these tasks and I hope that with the
Ribbon Microsoft we'll give us these feature...