Microsoft Office 2003

The mail folders and remaining Outlook features, such as your calendar and contacts, have been split into separate expandable sections. This simplifies things considerably, as the whole interface will always be dedicated to the task in hand.

Meanwhile, a new junk email filter can be set to work on a sliding scale, depending on how far you're willing to trust it. No messages are automatically deleted unless you really want them to be. Instead, they're moved to a junk folder so you can retrieve any false positives that manage to slip in. We won't be dumping our copy of InBoxer just yet, though. When we asked it to trash the most obvious pieces of junk from a download of 2,314 spams, it filtered out only 950 - much less than half.

As an added safety measure, images aren't now displayed by default. This is because spammers commonly reference JPEGs stored on a server within their messages. If Outlook downloaded them, it would confirm that the message was delivered and your address is valid, and so attract further spam.

Incoming messages trigger a Desktop alert, which fades onto and then off the screen, displaying the name of the sender and the subject line of the message itself. This is far more obvious than the old system of pinging your speakers and dropping an icon in the system tray, yet is discreet enough to not distract too much.

If you want a well-integrated communications tool as part of your suite then Microsoft Office is the only way to go. None of the others have anything that comes close to rivalling Outlook's range of features, and the fact that WordPerfect Office relies on it to implement group working features shows the extent to which it has become the industry standard.

CONCLUSION

Microsoft Office remains the most polished suite money can buy, but we can't recommend it over our Labs winner, OpenOffice. An impressive set of updates hasn't been enough to see it pull clear of the rapidly advancing free alternative, which just gets better with every release and now offers many features - PDF export included - which Microsoft Office just can't match. As such, if you opt for Microsoft you're paying more than £300 just for Outlook, which is hard to justify when there are so many competent alternatives in the form of Mozilla Mail, Eudora and Opera (which also includes spam blocking).

What Microsoft offers that the others don't is the complete belt-and-braces solution, providing the ultimate combination of usability and guaranteed compatibility. Making a small sacrifice in both of these areas can pay a significant dividend - in both the office and the home.

Another consideration for business users is Software Assurance, the licensing scheme introduced in 2001. Open only to those who buy in volume, it bundles support, training and unlimited updates into a three-year contract, during which businesses effectively lease the right to run Microsoft software - including Office 2003.

This has several benefits, not least of which is the option to upgrade on a rolling basis for one set fee. In the days when Microsoft was updating its flagship products on an 18- to 24-month basis this was an excellent deal, but this is no longer the case. The proposition is therefore far less appealing.

Analysts are already speculating that we could see an interim release of Office purely as a means of propping up the scheme, but if this is true then you have to ask whether the release serves the end user as much as it does its creator. If the answer is anything but a resolute 'yes' then IT teams would be advised to take a more serious look at the competition as their three-year contracts start to expire.