Microsoft Office 2003

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 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.