| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 | ||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 TEST CENTER Office spruced with surprising subtlety By Tom Yager , InfoWorld Test Center March 15, 2001 Shops needing basic collaboration and document management should plan on an XP upgrade
Although Microsoft Office XP doesn't set the desktop world on fire, it impressed us by its added functionality and ease of use across the board. Microsoft's front five, Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and FrontPage, received a balanced helping of new functions, some welcome network capabilities, and a fresh coat of GUI paint. This isn't an upgrade to stand in line for. Windows won't see that kind of excitement until the Windows XP desktop OS ships. But if your organization is desperate for some basic, effortless collaboration and document management, this upgrade should be on your collective to-do list. In other words, Office XP isn't an overnight-shipping-priority, all-company-meeting, mandatory-server-push kind of upgrade but a leisurely, ground-shipped, weekend-test-drive-on-the-kitchen-table kind of upgrade. It is more worthwhile and more enjoyable than we expected an Office upgrade would be. Each year, Office seems to get bigger and slower. Not this year. The English version of Office Professional has shrunk from four CDs to just one. Much of this reduction was realized by trimming seldom-used files and applications from the Office Professional package. Microsoft Publisher has been excluded from the Office XP Pro bundle, as has PhotoDraw and much of the clip art. Although many of Publisher's features are now part of Word, some users will miss Publisher's simplicity and its many document templates. Publisher is available on its own and in other Office bundles. Microsoft could add the removed content back in for retail, but we hope Office stays skinny. Economies of effort Slimming Office XP makes its network distribution far less burdensome, enough so that Microsoft has added an "install from the Web" option. The complete CD installs quickly, too, and even with all of the optional packages selected, Office XP took up far fewer megabytes on disk than Office 2000. Microsoft has made numerous small changes to Office XP's user interface. Some common functions, including New document and Search, have moved to a vertical Task Pane window that opens and closes off to the side as needed. This beats concealing your document with big pop-up dialog boxes. We'd like to see the Task Pane more widely used. Microsoft has also introduced Smart Tags, small in-line icons that pop up whenever Office does something automatically for you, or thinks you might want it to. For example, if you're typing along and Word suddenly converts a lowercase letter to a capital, the Smart Tag will appear. Clicking on the tag brings up a tiny menu offering to explain the change, reverse it, or never do it again. The cutesy Office Assistant could do some of that, but at too high a cost. The whole Office XP interface feels geared to a more efficient use of screen space and the user's time. More ways in, more ways out The keyboard isn't passé, but it's not always the most convenient tool for getting text into Office. Office XP opens more input doors by converting speech, handwriting, and OCR (optical character recognition) to text. The speech-recognition module took our dictation at normal conversational speed, contextually parsing InfoWorld's acronym-and jargon-laden prose with surprisingly few errors. Installation, setup, and training of the speech module took approximately 10 minutes. Users of Pocket PC systems are already familiar with Microsoft's impressive handwriting recognition, which is inexplicably capable of making sense of cursive chicken scratches. XML has risen to prominence of late, and we were pleased to find that Microsoft equipped Excel and Access with the capability of loading and saving XML files. Once again, XML I/O is simple, and the capability saves having to cobble together other tools to do the same job. In that same vein, HTML output is smarter, giving users the ability to target specific browser versions. Office XP will do as much as it can to format the document within that browser's capabilities, and you can turn individual features on and off. The world's wittiest, most beautiful document is worthless if nobody reads it. Office XP expands shared storage options to include WebDAV (distributed authoring and versioning), Exchange Server 2000's Web Storage System, and Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server (aka Tahoe). Users on local or externally hosted SharePoint networks will find collaboration functions integrated directly with all Office XP applications. SharePoint collaboration isn't a substitute for a large-scale collaborative content management system, but it's certainly worth considering for small groups. Availability and licensing Microsoft released Office XP to manufacturing on March 5, so the company is likely to meet if not beat its second quarter release target. Unlike earlier, downloadable Office previews, Office XP was distributed solely on CD. Microsoft is testing a new Internet license activation strategy that cripples the software until it is registered on the Internet. This scheme works well enough (so far) that a group of hackers were asking one another "did they beat us?" when we eavesdropped on a recent online chat. Microsoft hasn't announced whether or not online activation will be mandatory or optional in the retail release of Office XP. If it is mandatory, it will create a burden for corporate campuses that do not extend Internet connectivity to every desk. We're guessing that individual licenses will require Internet activation, but volume licenses will stay on the honor system. There is no one killer feature in Office XP, and we're glad Microsoft didn't try to create one. The approach is a refreshing alternative to overreaching. We suggest that you not let the relatively sedate list of new features make you think Office XP is a skippable upgrade. From both an IT and an end-user viewpoint, Office XP deserves to become the companywide standard productivity suite. Just not overnight. Related articles The future of Windows Installers ease app distribution pains Visual Basic.NET makes demands on businesses Microsoft's Allchin extols five benefits of .NET East Coast Technical Director Tom Yager (tom_yager@infoworld.com) is the author of Windows 2000 Web Applications Developer's Guide (Prentice Hall PTR, 2000).
SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
