Windows Metro interface to roll out across all Microsoft Software

Microsoft is promising to roll the bright and colourful look of Windows 8’s new Metro user interface across its other software.

The Metro interface heralds the biggest change to Windows since the 1995 edition and will get mass exposure when Windows 8 is released, probably in October.

Metro includes tiles which deliver live information about applications, such as email and weather, as the computing device is started.

Metro has already been rolled out on Microsoft’s XBox platform and is based on the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s management and security division, said at the Tech Ed Europe conference in Amsterdam on Tuesday that computer users could expect to see Metro rolled out in other Microsoft software on the drawing board.

“Where it makes sense we’ll definitely align,” Anderson said.

A new version of Microsoft Office, the productivity suite which includes note taker OneNote, email client Outlook, desktop publisher Publisher and word processor Word, is due next year and is called Office15.

“We love Metro style,” Anderson said. “It makes it so easy. It’s a design point that we all love using . . .I upgraded all my kids devices to that (using the preview version of Windows 8). It was an immediate change for them and they loved it. It’s a change but it’s something that you get accustomed to very quickly.”

A three storey high projection of the Metro user interfaced dominated the opening keynote speech at TechEd Europe.

One of the 250 sessions at TechEd is focussing on how software developers can write applications, or apps, for the Windows 8 apps store.