If you’re wondering where the benefit of Office 2003’s new features are for small and midsize businesses, you’re not alone. I don’t see them either. Don’t get me wrong, Office 2003 has some very cool and potentially highly useful features available all revolving around its use of XML. Office 2003 will use custom XML schemas to enhance Word and Excel functionality as well as allow companies to define their own schemas and data formats. Of course, even though it’s XML, only Office applications will be able to read these files, so while you’ll get more functionality within Office, Microsoft won’t lose the proprietary advantage it’s enjoyed with .DOC and XLS file formats. Office 2003’s upgraded database connectivity is pretty much an extension of its new XML muscle into SQL Server, although it supposedly supports the other big relational databases as well.
As you can see, all this sounds great for companies that can afford the human resources to customize Office 2003 to this depth. Small businesses, however, won’t be able to realize these benefits because it will simply be too expensive for them to implement. They’ll be able to benefit more from Outlook’s new integration with Business Contact Manager, but that’s about it.
The question is, will that be enough to push small business customers away from a still-recent upgrade to Office XP? Frankly, I don’t think so. Even with Redmond’s Open License strong arm tactics, you can expect Office 2003 to remain in the Fortune 1000 until well into 2004, and for many into 2005.
Correction
In this column, the list of what is included in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 was originally incorrect.
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