Microsoft
Refines Its Offerings
Office
2003 Priced; Ship Date Set
Microsoft
has released Microsoft Office 2003 to manufacturing and announced
its pricing. The suite
will be available in multiple editions, based on such products as
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Visio,
FrontPage, and Publisher. It
also can incorporate additional function when used with Microsoft
server products such as Microsoft Exchange and Office SharePoint
Portal Server. The
products incorporate support for important standards such as XML.
Microsoft
believes that with this release it is possible to use its software
to create “smart” clients, which offer the ability to use
Microsoft’s familiar software interfaces as front-end connections
to complex back-end line-of-business applications as well as to
enable seamless communication between Microsoft Office programs and
applications from independent software vendors.
Prices
for Microsoft Office 2003 Editions are unchanged from Office XP and
include Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003, $149;
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003, $399; and Microsoft Office
Professional Edition 2003, $499.
The products in the Microsoft Office System will be on the
volume licensing price list Sept. 1, 2003; some OEMs are expected to
begin shipping machines with Office 2003 editions pre-installed by
the end of September; the products will be broadly available to
retail customers in the United States and Canada on Oct. 21.
Microsoft will formally introduce the new Microsoft Office System in
a worldwide launch event on that date in New York.
Making
Content Editing Easier
Microsoft
will now let users fully customize their SharePoint Portal Server
2003 portals with FrontPage, both the design of their site, and also
the use of Web Parts, all while using the familiar, easy-to-use
WYSIWYG FrontPage editor. Users will be able to use Web Part
connections, to connect to information in other applications, to
build solutions across multiple web pages, and to create custom
reusable Web Parts in a catalog.
This will let them bring external data into Portal Sites,
connect to XML files and Web Services, and build both applications
and Web administration tools such as logs.
IBM
users can edit the look and feel of WebSphere Portal (WP) by making
changes to definitions in Java Server Pages (JSP) files.
These files consist of HTML and JSP syntax for defining text,
images and style attributes such as colors, fonts, size, etc. There are a set of required JSP files that are grouped
together to form a portal "theme."
WP ships with several pre-defined themes.
Most customers create their own themes by copying a
pre-defined theme and then making modifications.
Any HTML tool (including FrontPage) can be used to modify
these files. WebSphere
Studio contains an excellent HTML page editor that can be used for
this purpose.
Just
to wrap up our current tour of this subject, we thought we’d add
(although we’ll write about it at great length another time, that
MacroMedia’s Contribute 2.0 has arrived.
It lets content owners edit web pages without editing HTML or
knowing how to use a professional editing tool.
It’s used in conjunction with existing web sites (created
in any tool) or with templates created for the content owner in
Macromedia’s DreamWeaver.
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