If you’re not deaf, by now you know that tomorrow Microsoft will have its official announcement of Office XP.  Of course, a few hundred thousand corporate (and other) users, ourselves included, have being trying out various versions of Office XP for some time. 

Microsoft is hoping that its newest version of its omnipresent Office Suite (which has more than a 90% market share) will be so appealing that many will want to upgrade to its features.  That’s important to Microsoft, because the percentage of Office users upgrading to each new version of Microsoft Office has been decreasing over time – probably a result of feature fatigue or the Rule of Diminishing Incremental Returns. 

PC vendors are also hoping that Microsoft Office XP will be a rip roaring success, because to run the newest release successfully requires a modern PC with 128Mb of memory (some analysts suggest even more would be a good idea).  This, together with the anticipated delivery this fall of Windows XP could set off a wave of PC buying that would certainly brighten up business prospects for what has been a dismal outlook so far this year.

What's in Offce XP?

First, let us assure you that Office XP is a lovely product – we, of course, software addicts that we are, have been trying it out for some time.  We admire:

• Smart Tags let Office XP provide context-relevant menus of options as you work with document formats, spreadsheets and presentations.  These  menus may be extended with custom data and real time links.
  

• Task Panes offer access to Word styles, Powerpoint formats, files and other data, while keeping them out of  the main work area, in their own window panes.
  

• A variety of new Selective Search functions have been added, including the ability to support multiple search locations and to search in background; searches in Outlook are included, too.
  

• If a document must be closed due to an error or malfunction, documents are automatically saved during recovery to prevent document loss.  We’re running Office XP on Windows 98 so we’ve had quite a few chances to test this features; we’re hoping we see it less frequently with Windows XP which is said to be much more stable and robust. 
  

• In a bow in the direction of the .NET version of Office to come, Office XP offers a number of functions that are enhanced by services delivered over the web.  For example, a Web Template Gallery offers additional Powerpoint templates, and searchable galleries offer clip art images, sounds, and animations.
  

• And, as good news for this Office user, Clippy, that annoying Office Assistant, no longer automatically appears (unless you turn him on).

A number of collaboration functions have been added to Office XP including the ability to review, compare, and merge changes into shared documents. SharePoint allows users to share documents, discussions, and other information and to easily integrate these functions with Office XP.

Other basic functions have been enhanced.  For example, all of your Email accounts, including Instant Messaging, can be consolidated and managed in Outlook.  The Calendar function shows a consolidated reminder section (with overdue deadlines), proposes new times for meetings that require rescheduling, and uses color to better delineate functions. 

Microsoft offers a Giga White Paper with a great deal of useful information on how to Migrate to Office XP, depending on what you’re using now and what Operating System your PCs’ employ.  It’s especially worth noting that if you are currently on Windows 95, you should plan an OS and an Office upgrade (both to XP) at the same time, to minimize expense and inconvenience.  www.microsoft.com/office/xp/XP%20Migration.doc

Not Everyone is a Microsoft Office User: 

Corel’s WordPerfect Office 2002

Microsoft assumes, of course, that you’re likely to be an Office user.  That’s a reasonable assumption given that so much of the market agrees.  But 5% of new buyers (and a larger portion of the installed base) continue to be Corel WordPerfect Office users.  Corel has just shipped a new version of its office suite, WordPerfect Office 2002, with an emphasis on improving features across the board, from its word processor to its Quattro Pro spread sheet to its shared CorelCENTRAL calendaring and address book capabilities.  The product also includes the Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and net2phone, enabling Internet-based phone calls.  Part of its appeal, as always, is its price, always lower than that of Microsoft Office.  We’d doubt that Corel will lure current Microsoft Office users, but it continues to appeal to a portion of the SOHO, legal, and government market and has strong web and graphics editing features, a function of its common heritage with CorelDRAW, the company’s flagship product.

Sun’s StarOffice and WebTop

Sun’s StarOffice, now often referred to by its OpenOffice label, is another story.  Sun claims that more than 20 million users have copies of the product, 5 million via downloads, others via catalogs, retail stores, OEM’s, on all of its platforms, including DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and Linux.  But we know that we personally have a dozen or more copies, so we’d imagine that actual copies in use must be some smaller, if still substantial, number.  As best we can tell, the product is especially popular on the OS/2 platform (remember it started in Germany, where IBM was particularly successful in selling the OS/2 operating system and it’s the last actively marketed Office Suite for that platform), on Unix (every Sun employee uses it), and on Linux.  Being free, of course, helps a lot.  The desktop suite version of StarOffice/OpenOffice is now in Release 5.2 with Release 6.0 wending its way toward release later this year.  We’d rate Release 5.2 as quite serviceable but without the richness of features, especially in the collaboration space, that marks Microsoft Office XP.  Some of these features will, we understand, be enhanced or added in Release 6.

The desktop version of StarOffice is, however, only part of the story.  Sun has been working for the 20 months since it acquired StarOffice on a portal or web-server-based version of the software, a complete rewrite.  Now named Webtop, the software is now in a beta version, out at approximately 70 partners and customers.  Here, it helps to think of the software as a set of functions (somewhat lighter weight than in the desktop version) that are used to enable specific tasks in web-delivered applications.  For example, a financial services partner might use the spreadsheet portion to provide a calculator for a retirement plan while a customer service management ASP might use the word processor to enable the editor portion of a messaging function. Remember:

(1)  The software is still free – Sun expects to make its money selling Sun servers to the partners who choose to implement with and run this software.  It’s an interesting idea, but we weren’t sure how they could afford to offer adequate support.  However, Sun’s Gina Centoni assured us that support isn’t free, but is offered on a negotiated contract basis, at whatever level a particular enterprise requires, so Sun can afford to offer appropriate levels of support resources.

(2)  It hasn’t been delivered yet and chances to see it have been scant.  We caught a little glimpse of two partners with embedded Webtop applications, displaying them for an hour during Sun’s Analyst Conference in February.  Perhaps they’ll be able to show them soon at JavaOne or other summer shows.  We’d like to see some more.

The Lotus/IBM Approach

Lotus’ SmartSuite was once a contender in the Office Suite marketplace, but it’s fairly invisible these days.  SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.6 is the current offering, but we suspect this may be the last enhancement release.  Don’t assume, however, that Lotus/IBM lacks strategy in the office and collaboration space.  Lotus’ Notes/Domino offering retains its primacy in the groupware and messaging space.  It bows in the direction of Microsoft’s Office Suite popularity by offering complete compatibility between Notes and Microsoft Office (a preferred pairing in many corporate organizations). 

The Future 

The future, we suspect, may be more interesting.  Microsoft has made several things clear:

(1)      With its .NET initiative, products like Office will eventually be offered as Web Services.

(2)      Access to products or services will ultimately be secured not by purchasing permanent licenses (which is why so many customers still use Office 95), but rather by annual subscriptions that include the use of base software, its upgrades, support, and some level of web services.  Premium services will probably – not unlike cable TV offerings – be charged separately, in groups or singly.  So you might purchase an annual premium subscription for graphic services or statistical analysis, but “pay per use” for the budget software you need once a year. 

On the other hand, Microsoft is not alone.  It has invited the Windows ISV’s to join it in the .NET space and many are sure to take up that offer.  Some, to be sure, will offer mainly complementary services Microsoft would not choose to offer in any case.  But others will likely be offering products that overlap or otherwise compete with Microsoft offerings on the basis of lower prices, better (or at least different) interfaces, availability on other (read Linux) platforms, or expertise in particular vertical markets. 

We’d also expect to see a continuing effort by NetGen software companies to bring products to market that are created, from the start, for delivery in the web environment.  A number of office vendors have tried this space and we’ve seen real successes in areas like Email (HotMail and Yahoo Mail, for example) and on-line storage, but mainly in no or low revenue advertising-based business models.  Some are actually free (no charge at all); others offer some free services and then an upgrade to a paid service.  A hybrid product, ThinkFree Office, offers an interesting combination of stored files and web access from anywhere, with software (a Java application) downloaded to the desk- or laptop, permitting off-line usage.  Collaboration products like eRoom are also offered, for both internal installation, and in hosted form.

From these new beginnings, and the reinvention of well-accepted products like Microsoft Office, we expect to see the next generation of Office products emerge.  Keep in mind that more and more of us do less and less of our work in typical productivity applications and more of our work in Email (four hours a day on average and counting!) and on the web.  It’s not clear just what we’ll want from office software in the future.  But some things never change.  We will no doubt continue to require:

• An easy to use interface
  

• As much integration as possible between all of our tasks
  

• Great flexibility because no two users need exactly the same thing

That insures that however different new products may look or seem, they will need to preserve some very familiar ways.

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