Product Reviews

It has been six months since we saw the first beta version of Office 2003. Since then, there have been many improvements, but has this long wait been worth it?
The Office suite and related Office applications are now rebranded as the 'Office System'. All the usual applications are present, plus two new ones, but not all are available in the various editions of Microsoft Office 2003. FrontPage and the new OneNote application are only available as standalone applications. The new InfoPath application is available standalone or in the Professional Enterprise Edition, which is only available to volume-licence customers.
All the Office applications have had a cosmetic makeover and most have become easier to use, although some applications have benefited more than others. FrontPage and Publisher have improved, while Outlook has changed the most, featuring a vastly improved user interface.

XML
Word and Excel can now save documents in a new XML format. This preserves all the formatting and features of their native file formats but in a defined XML Schema. Files saved in this format can't be read by previous versions of Office but can be parsed or altered by any application that understands XML. The Professional versions of Word and Excel (those bought as standalone applications or in the Professional or Professional Enterprise editions of Office) can also mark up documents and workbooks with a custom-defined XML Schema. This allows any application or process that understands XML to get at or insert data inside these documents without having to go through the Word or Excel applications. Indeed, you can arrange for data from these documents to be saved as pure XML files without any Word or Excel formatting. Access 2003 can import and export XML data and you can use FrontPage 2003 to create data-driven websites from XML data sources.

SharePoint
Another feature of Office that Microsoft has been trumpeting is its integration with SharePoint, Microsoft's workgroup website technology. SharePoint Services is a free add-on to Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft is using the launch of Office 2003 to further publicise SharePoint. Through SharePoint, Office users can get document-collaboration facilities including check-in/check-out, meeting workspaces where attendees can see the agendas, decisions and minutes of meetings, and much more. It's important to remember, however, that you don't get any of these features unless you're running Windows Server 2003 and implement a SharePoint website.

IRM
Another new feature, which

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is confined to the Professional versions of some applications, is Information Rights Management (IRM). This allows the author of a document to declare that only certain people can read the document and that those people may not forward, print or copy the document, or any part of it, to anyone else. The document is encrypted, and you'll only be given a key to decrypt it if your email address is on the list of intended recipients, your copy of Windows is secured and authenticated with Microsoft, and you can access your company's key server. Once you have the key to a document, you can read it as often as you like unless the author has built in an expiry date. After that date, only the original author can open the document. This technology will be of interest to large companies wanting to stop sensitive information leaking out, but it needs careful examination before you consider implementing it. For instance, all the IRM security measures are useless if the users are allowed to install and run third-party screen-capture utilities.

Research Task Pane
The Research task pane allows you to search for words and phrases in a variety of offline references and online databases. The offline books include dictionaries and thesauri. Online there are paid-for services including the Encarta Encyclopaedia, magazine-clipping services, company information services and free machine translation services. Microsoft says these services will be relevant both globally and locally and aren't exclusively US-centric but, as we rapidly approach launch day, there are still precious few offerings that aren't Microsoft brands such as MSN or Encarta.
Applets
Several small applications ship with Office. Document Imaging is a TIFF file viewer, which is great for viewing and annotating faxes and scanned documents. It can also OCR text from a fax or scan and push it into a Word document. The Document Scanning applet makes it easy to get pages scanned and the image or text into an Office document. The new Picture Manager applet deals with most types of image files, particularly with those from digital cameras. It will automatically correct colour balance, brightness and contrast and can help eliminate red-eye. However, the Business Contact Manager add-in for Outlook is to be avoided. It's designed to extend Outlook's contact facilities to give multiple levels of contacts and track dealings with those contacts more closely, but can only be used by a single person and can't be extended or customised. With no upgrade path, you could have a big problem migrating to a more capable package later.

Conclusion
If you're thinking of upgrading, you must remember that none of the Office 2003 applications will run on Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, ME or NT. Windows 2000 (with SP 3), Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 are the only OSes supported. Single users of Office XP won't see much change except in Outlook and that may not be enough to tempt them to upgrade. The step from Office 97 or 2000 to Office 2003 is much more pronounced. Corporate customers may find more reasons to upgrade, particularly if they've already paid for it through Software Assurance.