Hands On: Microsoft Office 2003

The reviewer's packet for beta 2 that I received contained 15 different CDs, with a dozen different software products. Included is a new version of Microsoft's SharePoint Services that adds the collaborative features to Office, along with new applications such as One-Note (for quick note-taking) and InfoPath (for XML forms creation and submission), and Windows Rights Management (for controlling electronic distribution of documents). Each of these extend the way data can be created, shared and used.

They also expand the number of Microsoft tools that you'll need to run them. There is NetMeeting and Windows Messenger that are tied even closer to Office applications now in 2003. And let's not forget the latest version 6 of Internet Explorer, because so much of what Office tries to do hits the Web in new and interesting ways. Chances are you have some computers on your network, or on your customers' networks, that are running older versions of these products. If you are still running on Windows 98 or a version of Internet Explorer prior to version 6, you are out of luck: Office 2003 only works with Windows 2000 or XP machines and will need IE v6. During the installation, Office 2003 will also update portions of your operating system before it can run properly. Just getting everyone on a common version will take a few man-days worth of IT support time. Of course, you can buy some software from Microsoft to handle the updates, too. That may be more revenue opportunity for solution providers, but it also may be more trouble than it is worth if a corporation has to upgrade its aging user base.

All of those software CDs means that there are so many different bits and pieces of Microsoft software that getting everything going will take some doing. At least with Notes v.6, the installation is fairly straightforward -- it took me about an hour to set up my new Notes server, with a single installation path. With Office and its various brethren, I lost count of how many products I ended up installing, and how often I had to fill CDs in and out and reboot my computers. Maybe the next version of XP should just come with all this software preinstalled.

Once you get beyond the installation woes, there are actually many attractive features to Office 2003, especially for writers and content creators. The older versions of Office had this annoying paper clip character off the righthand side of the screen. It has been replaced with something truly useful called the research tool. This is a mini-browser-based reference center that has handy links to encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses, and even has the ability to look up stock quotes and other financial information without having to leave the office main screen. Outlook's views of e-mail messages and contacts has been sharpened up but will take some getting used to.

The Share Point Services portal software is also interesting: Workgroups can set up their own Intranets and keep track of documents, including versions and author information that isn't far from what we use here at VARBusiness to produce the magazine on Quark Publishing System. Of course, Share Point needs a whole bushel full of Microsoft products to run, including IIS and SQL Server, with particular versions and patches and reboots galore.

Office 2003 takes XML far deeper than previous versions, and that is both a good and bad thing. I've written before about Microsoft's hijacking XML standards for its own purposes, and this continues with the latest version of Office. Yes, you can save Office documents in XML format, but chances are only other Office 2003 users will be able to really make much sense of them.

Overall, you can see where Microsoft is taking Office, and if you have invested in Microsoft's softwar, services, and servers, this is a natural evolution and something to consider for future business development for VARs and solutions providers. The trick is being able to maintain all this software infrastructure as all the various pieces evolve.