The
New Office Products Are Coming
This
Spring/Summer will be an opportunity for anyone who needs to equip
themselves with new office software to have an unusually large set
of choices. Microsoft
is fielding a new version of Microsoft Office while Corel is
bringing out a new version of WordPerfect.
Sun will bring out a new version of StarOffice in the fall.
All of the products are already available in Beta versions.
At
the same time, new kinds of office software is also arriving.
For example, the Microsoft One Note software, designed to
be used with a Tablet and stylus, is now available both separately
and bundled in some versions of Office 11, to be used with desktop
Office, too, as a new kind of authoring tool.
We
also note the arrival of server-based office products from Sun
(nearing the market) and from IBM (available now as part of their
WebSphere Portal Server offering).
These are products designed for light usage users, but that
may describe many office workers who mainly use email and business
application software, but rarely require full-blown productivity
products like word processors and spreadsheets.
Microsoft Office 11
Don’t
be frightened when you open your Beta copy of Microsoft office 11.
We were startled to find 15 CD’s – with everything from
the Office beta itself (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access) to
copies of Publisher, Front Page,
and Outlook (expected) to copies of SharePoint and
SharePoint Services (and the Windows 2003 and Exchange Servers to
support it), One Note authoring software, and more.
We’ll
have a full dress set of comments on these products (Microsoft,
Corel, and Sun) soon, but we want to note that the betas are on
(the products will go into general availability from now to
mid-summer to fall) and users are already commenting on what they
do and don’t like.
We’ve
got everything on our desk already including StarOffice (Sun
doesn’t support review copies but we have downloaded it from
their beta site.)
We’re
thinking up some cool tests, keeping in mind that almost
everything we write these days, except a few long documents, like
this newsletter, are written in email documents.
Of course, we still do presentations – I’d guess that
will always be the case.
If
there’s something you think we should be including in our
thinking, let us know. And
if you’re testing these products, let us know what you think,
too.
Maybe
it’s time to change something about how we approach our work or
our tools.
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