Office 10 'incremental at best', says Meta Group

Microsoft has ditched two key ingredients of the next Office release, spelling the end of plans to make Office 10 its first web-aware content management system.

The Office Designer tool and Local Web Storage System will not be appearing in the final product, due for release midway through next year. Ashim Pal, programme director international of web and collaboration services at Meta Group, said: "It's an absolutely huge omission. Office 10 will be an incremental upgrade at best." He added. "If you are already installing Office 2000, there is nothing to compel you to go to Office 10." Office 10 was intended to be one of the key elements for filing content onto Microsoft's Web Storage System, which ships as part of Microsoft Exchange 2000. The Web Storage System is expected to be part of a future Microsoft server application, code-named Tahoe. This is an integral part of Microsoft's .Net initiative, aimed at making the company's products internet ready. Meta Group's Pal said: "Microsoft is effectively admitting that integration [with their Web Storage System] won't be complete with this release. There will have to be another release later on, or a service pack, which I suspect will be the case." This will not constitute a threat to the Redmond empire's control of the office applications market, he said. "In terms of Office being a cash cow, there will be some impact, but the floor won't be dropping out." The news is likely to be welcomed by web content management players such as Interwoven and Vignette, who might have had their market squeezed if Microsoft was able to deploy Office 10 as originally planned. "Microsoft will be doing nothing in that space for another year," said Pal. "Office 2000 was a good start for making a web-aware Office product, but it is completely unmanageable. Every time you do a 'Save as', it creates a folder with hundreds of web documents. That's OK if you're dealing with small amounts of content, it's a nightmare if you are managing a large website." Only 20 per cent of Meta Group clients have implemented Office 2000, said Pal, with numbers as low as five per cent in some South European countries. He predicted Windows 10 is only likely to be an option for companies planning to upgrade systems from Q3 2000 onwards. However, Ken Smiley, Senior Industry Analyst at the Giga Information Group, took the opposite view. 'I don't think the pieces they took out were that important. There will still be some improvements to the performance of applications like Outlook. But it might be 30 per cent improvement, rather than a 100 per cent improvement. "There are still some compelling features in this piece," he said. "Microsoft realised it couldn't get all of the bugs out of this in time for the release of the code. I think it shows some responsibility on Microsoft to pull this release, rather than make programmers deal with a buggy piece of software." Microsoft was unavailable for comment.