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Codename: Office 10
Product: OfficeXP (known as Office 10 in beta; released May 31, 2001.)
From: Microsoft
Price: Retail prices range from $479 to $799 (US) for various versions; upgrades start at US$239. An ASP pricing structure is also expected. A Corporate Preview Kit is available for US$19.95. A 30-day trial version costs US$9.95 (C$14.95), available from Microsoft's website.
Pros: Improved Web integration, including the ability to save documents to a URL, for access via the "web storage system." Enhanced ability to collaborate on documents and annotate them. Integrated OCR feature. "Smart Tags" is probably the addition that most users will see as the "must have" feature. Controversial "subscription" (ASP) option has been temporarily shelved.
Cons: (currently) problematic speech recognition. Controversial "Windows Product Activation" (copy protection) requirement. Office Designer and Web Storage features from betas 1 and 2 were cut from the final release.
Office.NET? Not Yet.
As noted by Paul Thurrott in his article entitled Microsoft previews Office 10- It's no Office.NET, Office XP is not, as some reports have suggested, abandoning the shrink-wrap "traditional" office software model, nor is it completely Internet-based. Instead, it adds (for better or worse) a smattering of both of these components to the existing Office code base, making Office 10, or Office XP as it will be known when it is released, around the end of May 2001, an upgrade appealing to those looking for new functionality from the classic office apps: the PowerPoint presentation program, Excel spreadsheet, and the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. As with previous Office releases, you can expect to see Standard, Professional and Premium editions of the package, adding new components (Access database, FrontPage web-design tool, Publisher DTP application, etc.) to various version of the mix, too. See our Office 2000 review for a summary of key features likely to be carried over to the new version.
There is, however, at least one former Office feature that doesn't seem to be here this time around. Although the situation could change by the suite's release date, at the moment, it looks like PhotoDraw is no longer an Office inclusion. Instead, there's an Office Document Imaging applet that performs OCR and allows to to reuse text directly in Office applications. The text found in the scanned images can also be searched.
Characterized by Bill Gates as "the most significant release of Office ever," the first two beta releases of the next version of Microsoft's flagship business application have been getting so-so reviews from early testers. (We have to wonder: why are they complaining that Office XP's speech recognition is "imperfect?" Are there any alternatives that aren't?) A US$19.95 Corporate evaluation kit (detailed later in this article) allows you to decide for yourself if Office XP is a worthwhile upgrade.
It strikes us that complaints of beta 2 not offering significant advantages over beta 1 or previous versions of Office are, at the very least, shallow observations.
Beta two of the product, delivered to a number of beta testers and Microsoft's largest customers, added a sizable collection of templates for a feature called "Office Designer" missing from beta 1. With these templates, testers reported, a company could quickly and easily build and add powerful collaboration functions to a website, built entirely from the XML code that is at the heart of Microsoft's ".net" strategy for nearly seamless cross-platform interoperability.
Office Designer was to have been a wizard-driven template system for developing XML pages; the semi-structured data store and installable file system known as the Local Web Storage System is related to the Web Storage System (formerly known as the Web Store until trademark problems forced Microsoft to change the name) at the heart of Exchange 2000.
Sadly, however, Microsoft says it has made a decision, based on feedback from beta 2 testers, not to include the Office Designer tool and Local Web Storage System in the shipping version of the Office XP product. The change in plans reportedly came after testers complained that these features weren't reliable enough to use. ZDNet has additional details.
Apr. 2001 Update: A source close to the company in late March told PC Buyer's Guide that these tools will be made available to purchasers of the Developer version of the suite, after all. However, we spoke to Elliot Katz of Microsoft Canada on April 6. He said Office Designer will not ship with any version of Office XP. We'll update this section with new information if this situation changes in the future.
The Local Web Storage System's "online simulation" approach to offline data access is based in part on technology incorporated into Microsoft's SharePoint Server (formerly known as "Tahoe.") It allows Web based data to be accessed as if on a disk drive and vice versa. The Office implementation was intended to deliver the ability for Outlook users to work when offline, and would have extended the company's "Save to the Web" feature, already found in Office 2000 and FrontPage products.
Microsoft on May 5th finally revealed its plans to offer a subscription option for Office 10. Less than a month before the official release of Office XP, the company decided it would not offer the plan to North American users this year, and has confirmed will be offered first to users in selected markets -- probably Far East countries in which piracy of Office is rampant. Under the plan, users will be able to pay a substantially reduced amount for what amounts to a time-limited subscription to a version of the software. While plan a subscription could be a boon for occasional users, analysts had worried that such a scheme might negatively impact Microsoft's sales of the upgrade. Office revenues make up a significant portion of the company's overall sales. Indeed, the announcement to shelve the subscription plan comes only a day before Dell is slated to begin selling Office XP. Even in locations where a subscription pricing will be offered, Microsoft has confirmed the old-fashioned "buy it outright" option will remain available.
Fortunately, Microsoft has confirmed that Office 10 will offer full backward compatibility with Office 2000 and Office 97 versions of Office. Users of these older versions will not be able to utilize the new functionality in Office 10 but they will still be able to open, edit and otherwise work with the files. Still uncertain is exactly how pricing and long-term availability to Office documents will work under the terms of the scheme.
Another decision that affects users of older versions of Office is the revelation that owners of Office 95 will not be eligible for upgrade pricing, but will have to pay full price for Office XP.
Still up in the air is exactly how Microsoft will price the Application Service Provider (ASP) "hosted" versions of the applications. Computer Reseller News has posted an unofficial pricelist; however, Microsoft has not released official pricing publicly. The company has, however, confirmed that Office XP will be copy protected, using a system known as Windows Product Activation (WPA). This scheme is expected to appear in several other Microsoft products in the year 2001 and beyond, including Windows XP and Visio.
FrontPage 10
If you use FrontPage -- or gave up on it due to its previous weaknesses -- you may find it one of the most compelling reasons to upgrade to the "Office XP Professional Special Edition version" of the suite, which includes this program. Finally, FrontPage allows us to open and edit pages with Cold Fusion markup language and other foreign tags without destroying them. Finally, it can paste text with or without formatting. (Goodbye to those annoying <DIV> tags!) The latter feature alone -- accomplished by bringing up a "smart tag" icon after a paste operation is initiated -- is reason enough on its own to justify an upgrade for some users.
Another very useful feature is the ability to easily turn off underlines for links on a case-by-case basis. This sure beats manually constructing a Cascading Style Sheet to accomplish this. Other niceties include a "history" of previous links, email addresses and other URLs previously used on your site, making it easy to add these URLs to pages you create or revise.
We encountered what seemed to be a bug when we installed the program on a 300 MHz Compaq Presario -- trying to edit a previously embedded URL seemed to cause the cursor to stick in an endless loop of flashing tool tips until the mouse button was clicked elsewhere on the page (weird!). However, this problem didn't seem to affect any of our other test machines.
Word 10
For many users of Office XP, Word will be the program used most. Here, too, the improvements are subtle but significant. We always found Word 2000's HTML export hopelessly flawed. Fortunately, we must not have been the only ones pleading with the company to provide an option to export HTML without all the weird Office-specific XML tags that Word 2000 insisted on inserting. Now, this extra bulk (which roughly doubles the size of your files!) is optional, as it should be. This change is probably bad news to Macromedia, which probably sold a lot of copies of Dreamweaver thanks to that program's "Clean up Word HTML..." function, but good news for those who need to convert Word documents into Web pages. In fact, Dreamweaver is still able to clean up the HTML somewhat beyond that which is output by Word's "filtered" export, so hard-core HTML coders may still find it useful.
Outlook 10, etc.
Word is Outlook's default text editor when sending email. There are speed gains in this version of Outlook, but they're nullified by having a bulky input editor such as Word. Fortunately, you can change this setting. The version of Office XP we tested, We're still testing the XP incarnations of Outlook, PowerPoint, Access and Excel; look for additional reports here soon.
Some of the advanced functionality of Office XP is only revealed when it is combined with Windows XP. Beta 2 of the forthcoming operating system includes support for optional input methods, including handwriting recognition and speech -- both of which are possible when Office XP is installed.
Pricing
There are four retail versions of Office XP, each with different features and prices (shown here in US$).
- Standard: Word, Excel Outlook, PowerPoint ($479; $239 upgrade)
- Professional: Word, Excel Outlook, PowerPoint, Access ($579; $329 upgrade)
- Professional Special Edition: Word, Excel Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage ($699; $479 upgrade)
- Developer: Word, Excel Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage and development tools ($799; $549 upgrade)
There are two other versions of Office available only on new PCs.
- Small Business: Word, Excel, Outlook and Publisher.
- Professional with Publisher: Word, Excel, Outlook and Publisher, Access, PowerPoint.
Microsoft says that purchasers of Office 2000 between Apr. 2 and June 30 are entitled to an upgrade coupon redeemable for a comparable version of Office XP upon its release. News.com has additional details.
For more information on Office XP, see our hands-on test report of the final release. Also, check out the following reviews.
For Further Reading
- ActiveWin: OfficeXP beta 2
- Betanews: Office 10 Beta Two Unimpressive
- eWeek: Office 10 beta "underwhelming"
- Geek.com: MS responds to Office 10 subscription
- WinInfo: COMDEX- Gates demos TabletPC, Office 10, VS.NET
- WinInfo: Report- Office 10 hits Beta 2 after Outlook refresh
- WinInfo: Office 10 beta 1 review
- WinInfo: Microsoft demonstrates new Office 10 developer features
- WinInfo: Microsoft sings Office 10's praises
- WinInfo: more Office 10 commentary...
- ZDNet: Microsoft cuts two Office 10 features.
- Ars Technica: Windows Product Activation - An Early Look
- ActiveWin: Try Office XP- Corporate Preview Kits Are Now Available
CheaperOffice.com Office Buyers Insiders Guide - Avoid the "full version trap."
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