Microsoft Office XP reviewed
Introducing Microsoft Office XP
The Office product line enters an interesting gray area with this version, as Microsoft is in the opening phase of a transition to the Web-based services that will define its .NET ("dot net") strategy for the future. A massive, monolithic product, Office will not be brought forward to .NET, but will instead be retrofitted with .NET-like features for the short term while Microsoft prepares its .NET-based successor, which is based on a project called NetDocs. So Office XP, like its immediate follow-up, the cunningly named Office 11, resembles previous Office suites while providing a number of new trend-setting features that will get us more comfortable with .NET. And of course, Office XP includes a number of features that are based on customer feedback from Office 2000. Microsoft performed on-site customer visits, focus-group studies, end-user surveys, document collection studies, lab usability studies, and interacted with customer panels and councils to develop its "Office XP Product Vision Areas," which defined how the product would be improved. In a future part to this review (What's new in Office XP), I'll look at the individual features and improvements in this product, but for now, I'd like to focus on the general areas in which Microsoft focused for this release.
Simplification
Office is a massive collection of applications, and each application is itself a massive collection of functionality. Because of this, Office is much more complex than it used to be, a necessary side-effect from the Office feature wars of the mid-1990's, when Lotus and WordPerfect fielded viable contenders. To make Office simpler, Microsoft looked at the ways people use the products and determined which functionality was used most often. The company discovered that the vast majority of Office users spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking their favorite Office applications each time they sit down at a new machine. And Microsoft says that users are combining data from multiple Office applications more frequently, though I've always wondered at the demonstrations where virtually every application in the suite is used to create a cohesive, compound document. Does anyone really work like that?
One of the problems with pre-Office XP versions of the suite is that it's hard for users to take advantage of all of the features in each of the applications. So in Office XP, the company has made it easier for people to get at these features.or external tools.
Solutions for critical customer segments
Microsoft has identified three key customer segments for Office, including individuals, teams, and organizations. Individuals at home or work will able to take advantage of Office XP's simplicity, reliability, and security. Team users will benefit from its collaboration features. And organizations will benefits from its new deployment tools and enterprise improvements.
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