First Look: Microsoft Office 2003 Small Business Edition Will Outlook Contact Management Lure Upgraders off the Fence? Eric Grevstad
Mon 7/14/03 -- With the new "Microsoft Office System" campaign emphasizing the suite's ties to Windows Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services -- for XML integration of desktop documents and e-mails with intranets, company Web sites, and enterprise database info -- it's hard not to conclude (as WinPlanet has suggested) that this fall's Microsoft Office 2003 will be aimed more at corporate headquarters than home offices and small storefronts.
But Microsoft begs to differ: The software giant insists that Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 will offer compelling reasons for 1- to 24-person or -PC businesses -- companies with modest cash flows, no IT departments, and the five- to eight-year upgrade cycles that make them likely to have left well enough alone instead of switching from Office 97 or 2000 to Office XP -- to invest in the new version.
Last week, in fact, Microsoft sent both a senior product manager and the latest Office 2003 Beta 2 Technical Refresh CDs to WinPlanet and our sister site SmallBusinessComputing.com to make the case for the upgrade (though its ship date and price are both still unannounced). Both sites will publish more detailed hands-on reports in the weeks ahead, but here's your first look at how Redmond hopes to convince small offices to embrace its newest productivity package -- and resist the lower-priced Corel WordPerfect Office and free OpenOffice.org.
By Popular Demand: PowerPoint and Less Spam
As reported last April, Small Business Edition (SBE) -- to be available at retail, preinstalled on new PCs, and via corporate volume licenses -- will be one of six Office 2003 versions or bundles. Like the others, it'll require an up-to-date operating system -- either Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 -- and carry Microsoft's Product Activation registration and copy-protection requirements.
In addition to Word, Excel, Outlook, and Publisher, SBE 2003 includes PowerPoint -- the presentations package omitted from previous Small Business bundles -- and Business Contact Manager -- a new add-in that gives Outlook some of the account- and sales-tracking capability of rivals like Act or GoldMine. The Access database, FrontPage Web-authoring, InfoPath XML forms-creation and -distribution, and OneNote note-taking and -organizing packages will be sold separately, as will Windows SharePoint Services for more document-collaboration functions such as shared attachments. (If you don't have a local server, Microsoft's bCentral small-business portal will host SharePoint sites for a fee.)
Outlook 2003 -- or Office Outlook 2003, if you follow Microsoft's new syntax of applying the Office prefix to every product name -- promises more efficient e-mail handling, with an easier-reading message pane at the right of the screen (showing, the company claims, almost twice as much of each message earlier versions' default layout at the same resolution or screen size). Organizing or arranging messages is quicker and more flexible, with flags and folders for follow-up, reference, or searching, including the ability to view and save message threads or conversations.
New anti-spam measures include a Junk E-Mail folder that catches many (though not even Microsoft's scientists promise all) unsolicited commercial messages, and a default filter for HTML mail that declines to download images from remote servers -- because, Redmond says, sending a query to a marketer's image server is tantamount to saying, "Yes, you've caught a live one, send me more spam." (If you want to send customers an e-mail message containing images, you'll want to embed them in the body of the message.) More traditional, customizable lists of trusted and blocked senders and servers help you fine-tune the e-mail filters.
