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Microsoft Office XP: Part 1 - Hoopla vs. Reality
A hands-on test of the final release of Microsoft Office XP Part 1 - Hoopla vs. Reality
Introduction
Microsoft is probably best known for its operating systems, but make no mistake: a hefty portion of its revenues come from sales of the Office software suite. The company claims there are 250 million users worldwide using Office -- making it more widely used, the company maintains, than any other software product ever developed. In an effort to persuade users of previous versions to upgrade to the new Office XP release, the company is staging product demonstrations (in some cases, complete with mascots in ridiculous costumes) across the country.
Microsoft launched Office XP worldwide on May 31, 2001 with demonstration events at more than 100 locations, including 10 cities in Canada. In Vancouver, Canada, Barb Alexander, Microsoft's Regional Sales Manager for British Columbia, announced the immediate availability of the product and the diagramming tool Visio 2002, and announced the results of a recent American Institutes for Research survey on workplace productivity. The survey (sponsored by Microsoft) found that Office XP users required less than half the time required by users of Office 2000 to perform several common document management tasks.
Some of these tasks included:
- Integrate existing PowerPoint content into a new presentation
- Add a diagram to a PowerPoint slide
- Apply a new design template to a PowerPoint slide
- Apply Another new design template to a PowerPoint slide
- Find and fix formula errors in an Excel spreadsheet
- Paste an Excel table into Word and reformat to match the existing template
- Import stock information from the Web into an Excel spreadsheet
- Dismiss ten appointment reminders in Outlook
- Type Two paragraphs and explore the AutoCorrect options
- Change the style and formatting of headings in a word document
- Accept and merge changes from email attachments into one document
Ms. Alexander detailed the pricing structure of the various Office XP versions -- the most expensive of which sell for more than $1100 -- and addresses questions from the audience on various aspects of the program, including upgrade options, licensing policies and the controversial "product activation" feature included as an anti-piracy measure.
New Feature Overview
Later, Technical Specialist Glenn Berg demonstrated several features of the new software:
- Task Panes - a list of common tasks and recent documents shows up at the right side of a new document's screen. Interestingly, an informal survey of journalists at the table at which we were sitting determined that none of us had ever used this feature, although all were using Office XP.
- Smart Tags - Available in all Office XP programs, Smart Tags are undoubtedly the most useful additions to Office for most users. The ability to paste text retaining the source formatting or matching the destination document's styles -- or without formatting at all -- is practically worth the upgrade price alone, for us. Smart Tags are also provided to undo autocorrections, pull information from the Outlook address book and automatically associate the information with typed-in names, addresses or phone numbers, and more. Smart Tags are provided to look up zip codes, display maps, even driving directions to U.S. destinations. Microsoft says that the Smart Tags feature is fully extensible and says there are already several dozen third-party Smart Tags on its website designed to integrate a variety of services, such as Expedia travel information, MSNBC news and weather forecasts, UPS tracking numbers, and so on. (These are accessible by clicking a "More Smart Tags" button from within the program. Unfortunately, the so-called "eServices" they require are not currently provided in Canada.) Microsoft's Canadian reps claim that Nereosoft, ACCPAC International, Keylogics and Vancouver's own Pivotal Software are a few of the Canadian companies working on custom Smart Tags, allowing integration with existing applications and tailoring of Office XP to specific markets.
- Send For Review - This feature provides a Compare and Merge feature that allows colour-coded comments contributed by several users to be displayed and/or filtered and, if desired, merged into a single "master" document revision.
- SharePoint Team Services - With the new SharePoint Team Services, Office users can add markup tags and review comments to a document, participate in server-based discussion forums, contribute to mailing-list activities, and manage schedules and appointments as a group. This feature of Office XP was delivered, the company says, to address a common complaint from Office users that the collaboration features in the previous release were hard to install and use.
- Group Schedules - Team members can see each other's calendars and arrange meetings that fit with everyone's schedules.
Several of the demonstrations took advantage of the product's integration with Microsoft's "back end" services and servers. In fact, by our count, the demonstrated features, if implemented as described, would require five different Microsoft servers -- not all of which, Berg admits, should be run on a single machine. In fact, Berg was running Windows 2000 Advanced Server on his laptop -- not something we imagine the average Office user would be likely to do.
For full "collaborative" functionality, Office XP connects to:
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Server (server extensions are also provided for Windows NT server)
- Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server for email, calendaring and "web store" semi-structured data retrieval features
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000 for database integration
- Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server for indexed searches, discussion groups, newsgroup lists and other collaboration features*
- BizTalk Server for connectivity to other back-end data sources
... not to mention proxy services, firewalls, and so on, as provided by the company's ISA server and other server and BackOffice products.
*A basic subset of SharePoint Portal Server services is provided in the Developer and Special Edition versions of Office XP, with a set of server extensions called SharePoint Team Services.
One of the most often touted features of Office XP is its Smart Tags feature that extracts information from databases or other data sources and, with a click on an unobtrusive icon, inserts it or reveals it in your Office document. Berg demonstrated this feature by showing how, when writing a letter, you can insert the address of the addressee automatically with a mere click. Microsoft did not mention that one of the features of this Smart Tags function is currently inoperative in Canada: addresses in the U.S. can be pulled from an online Streets and Maps database. This feature is promised to be available for Canadian addresses in a downloadable Office update, expected within 60 - 90 days.
SharePoint Team Services
We found it mildly amusing that, while Microsoft publicly claims that the SharePoint Team Services features are easy to install and use, we managed to stump three Microsoft Office product specialists the day of the launch by simply asking them how to install it. As it turns out, the feature, which shows up as a taskbar in Internet Explorer and various Office applications, requires a machine on the network (or your ISP) to be running a Windows 2000 or NT server. The administrator of this server must install a set of SharePoint server extensions provided on the Office XP Special Edition or Developer Edition CDs, or the full-fledged SharePoint Portal Server product (which costs US $4,769.99 for a five-client license). The server extensions are installed and configured via the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) found in its Windows server products. Clearly, this is not something the average Office user will be able to install or administer themselves -- a situation not helped by the fact that the Discussion Server setup dialog includes no Help whatsoever, but instead refers you to "your administrator." (A TechNet article on Microsoft's website describes the deployment procedure.)
Upgrade Options
- There are several retail versions of Office XP.
- Office XP Standard - Word 2002, Excel 2002, Outlook 2002 and PowerPoint 2002. New users: $749; $349 upgrade.
- Office XP Professional - Word 2002, Excel 2002, Outlook 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Access 2002. New users: $899; $529 upgrade.
- Office XP Professional Special Edition- Word 2002, Excel 2002, Outlook 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Access 2002, FrontPage 2002, Publisher 2002, SharePoint Team Services and, for a limited time, an IntelliMouse Explorer. $709 upgrade.
- Office XP Developer - Same as Professional Edition, plus FrontPage 2002, SharePoint Team Services and other professional tools and services. New users: $1169; $809 upgrade. (All prices in Canadian $)
Existing users of Office 97 and Office 2000 are eligible for upgrade pricing. Microsoft says Office 95 users are not eligible for upgrade pricing, but must pay full price. (The program doesn't even run on Windows 95, by the way.) There are no longer any "crossgrade" offers for users of WordPerfect or other competing products.
Licensing Policies
Microsoft told the press assembled at the launch event that the program's license does not allow non-simultaneous use on two computers owned by the same registered user. However, this statement did not seem to be consistent with our reading of the license agreement and a call to Elliot Katz, the Office product manager at the company's Canadian headquarters later confirmed that such usage is still allowed, as it was in previous Office installations. Under the terms of the license, a user may install and use the program on two computers (say, a laptop and a desktop PC, or one at home and one at work), as long as both are registered to the same user and are not in use simultaneously.
Product Activation
We also asked for a confirmation of a statement made by Glen Berg, in which he claimed that the product activation would permit only "one or two" changes to your computer's hardware configuration (such as might occur when upgrading a CPU) before your product activation would no longer be valid and the software will insist on being re-activated. Berg stated that the third time you change your hardware, product activation will no longer be a two-step automatic procedure, but will require a call to Microsoft. He also emphasized that only retail versions of the software require activation. Corporate installations are free of this intrusion.
PC Buyer's Guide has been testing the final retail package of Office XP. Here's what we've discovered so far.
Memory
Basic system requirements, as stated by Microsoft are, as usual, dramatically lower than that which you you should consider practical. The company says a P133 with 32MB of RAM is adequate to run the program. In fact, we found that a Pentium II/300 system with 64MB of RAM was barely powerful enough to operate the "Professional + FrontPage" version of the program under Windows Millennium Edition. On such a PC, operation was slow enough that some highlighting a link in FrontPage sometimes didn't work reliably and the procedure had to be repeated several times to get the highlight to "stick." A similar operation in Office 2000 worked on this hardware without problems.
We also encountered some memory related problems on a Windows Me system equipped with 256 MB of RAM. The images below were taken on the system while running only two applications (one of which was our screen capture program). The computer had been rebooted a few hours earlier.
Outlook
One of the first indications that our system was running low on memory was encountered when we opened up Outlook 2002 and saw buttons and text input areas overlapping each other.
The System control panel reported 21 percent resources free when this occurred.
A few minutes later, the situation deteriorated, when this dialog popped up instead of a requested email message.
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