Office XP: Suite enough?
With about 130 million registered Microsoft Office users, a new version is bound to garner lots of attention. And if your company is a current Office user, it's a likely candidate for an upgrade to Office XP, especially if it's still toiling away with Office 95 or 97. If you currently use Office 2000, which may already meet all or most of your company's needs, think hard about the possible benefits of the $239 upgrade. And while XP's Custom Installation Wizard and Custom Maintenance Wizard simplify the upgrade process, you still must consider the cost of implementation and retraining staff.
For the enterprise, Office XP's improvements fall into four main areas:
- ease-of-use enhancements designed to improve productivity
- collaboration
- security
- implementation
This story first appeared in CNET Enterprise on 5/7/01.
Tags, panes, and good-bye to Clippy Two new features stand out among Office XP's productivity and ease-of-use enhancements. The first is Smart Tags, which are XML-based pop-up icons that quickly access formatting and data-sharing features related to the current operation. They can be used, for example, to accelerate tasks such as adding names to a contact list and database lookups. Smart Tags can be very handy, but for now, users cannot create their own tags. Microsoft does plan, however, to release a toolkit for developers or advanced users to create custom Smart Tags.
Task Panes are graphical navigators that fill a frame on the right side of the screen. They're helpful and can modestly improve productivity by minimizing the time you spend looking for recently used documents and common commands. The Task Panes also aggregate most of the formatting, style selections, and format codes for a document, then present them in a way that makes them easy to understand and modify. Task Panes don't really provide any new functionality, as most of the commands they expose are already available elsewhere in menu dialog boxes. But Task Panes make it a lot easier to find and change the settings.
Other Office XP enhancements, for example, handwriting recognition or voice recognition, require specialized hardware, such as a digitizing pad and a microphone/headphone. Based on our tests, the value of these two technologies isn't likely to warrant the implementation effort and expense, unless your work environment specifically requires them.
Ironically, while this release of Office emphasizes new help and ease-of-use features, one of the improvements we like best is how easy it is to deactivate the overly helpful automation features of Office 97 and 2000. For example, automatic bulleted lists and other reformatting automation are less intrusive than in earlier versions, offering assistance rather than going ahead and making changes. Now, if formatting changes occur that you don't want, you just highlight the misbehaving text and click the Clear Formatting command to return the text to its original state. Many veteran Office users will be happy to hear that Clippy, the ubiquitous paper clip, is now turned off by default so that you have to voluntarily activate it before it can start annoying you.
Enterprise-class customers are likely to warm up to Office XP because of its welcome collaboration enhancements and its well-meaning--but sometimes intrusive--attempts at security improvements.
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Leading the pack of collaborative computing features and information-sharing capabilities is SharePoint Team Services, a Web- or intranet-based portal where staffers can publish or post documents, check documents in and out, and share ideas and messages. Tightly integrated with Word, SharePoint conveniently lets users save documents from Word's File Save menu as well as upload contacts directly to the Web server for sharing. To help find and share stored information, SharePoint offers an advanced search engine.
SharePoint can be hosted internally on a Windows 2000 server, with Internet Information Server, or externally by selected Internet service providers. For now, Microsoft is using the scarcity of SharePoint-ready ISPs to drive traffic-collaboration-minded teams to its own MSN.com. Third-party integrators planning to offer implementation and configuration services for large SharePoint portals will include Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Unisys.
Word's Send For Review is a structured document-routing and approval process that can help expedite group document editing. For example, multiple reviewers can now edit a file simultaneously. Each recipient gets a review request form and his or her own copy of the document to mark up. Reviewers' revisions and comments are placed in the document's margin until the author accepts them; as a result, the edits don't obscure the original document. Send For Review adds a level of automation lacking in Office 2000's Track Changes that should improve the efficiency and accuracy of a potentially confusing and time-consuming process.
Whether you lose data as the result of an accident or someone's deliberate action, it's still lost. Microsoft says that it has gone under the hood to tweak Office XP's architecture to prevent application errors from causing system crashes. Our informal tests using corrupted documents that lock up Office 97 and, less often, Office 2000, seem to validate that accomplishment.
Five document recovery tools strive to compensate for Windows' intermittent instability. Word, Access, and Excel initiate a one-click recovery process at the time an error occurs that allows you to save your document. You can opt to resave the original file, restart an auto-recovered file, or save the current crashing/hanging version before the data disappears forever. The repair and recovery features activate automatically. Should these measures fail, a last-ditch tool can extract at least some of the data from the afflicted document. These automatic recovery tools could help cut down the number of help desk calls and reduce the number of times users interrupt their coworkers for assistance.
I Love You, Melissa
Virus writers tend to target widely used applications such as Outlook or Word, so it's good news that Outlook enhances protection against self-replicating viruses such as Melissa and I Love You from damaging users' files or reputations. Outlook now restricts an external application's access to its address book and contacts; predefined programs are granted access, but for only a specified length of time.
Administrators can remotely or locally set Outlook's security to one of three levels. High security allows only macros digitally signed by Trusted Sources to run. Low allows all macros to run. Medium blends the two states and requires the user's acceptance before any macro can execute. A centrally administered system policy setting, however, can prevent users from accepting any macros from unknown sources, even if the user tries to accept it.
By default, Outlook will block 38 attachment file types, such as BAT, EXE, VBS, and JS. Outlook users must explicitly unblock one of these types to open the file. What's more, HTML message scripts are blocked by default as protection against embedded viruses. Administrators can select file extensions for Outlook to open or to ignore, and they can apply the policy systemwide or selectively.
While Outlook's fortified security features will better control the spread of viruses and other malicious code, it's possible that the cure is worse than the disease. Microsoft's strategy of preventing macros from running as well as blocking common file attachments from executing could hamper productivity, create headaches for the help desk, and generally irritate users. But if your company's been burned by a virus, you may welcome Microsoft's attempt to provide bulletproof security for Outlook.
Digital IDs
Offenders who try to circumvent security by masquerading as legitimate applications may be thwarted by Office XP's support of digitally signed applications. The process can provide some peace of mind by requiring developers to identify themselves and sign their names to the code or add-in programs they create, thereby validating the source code as secure.
In a less intrusive method of handling viruses, when an Office application requests a document, Office XP's integrated antivirus application programming interface (API) allows third-party virus scanner vendors to scan the document before the application opens it.
Finally, individual files in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel can be digitally signed or encrypted with a variable-length key. Digital signatures can also help prevent hackers from embedding malicious code in Smart Tags.
For a large organization, any upgrade is a headache. But Microsoft has anticipated some of the Office XP implementation issues with several enhancements that will help accelerate deployment and facilitate subsequent maintenance. These include a custom installation wizard that records all of the configuration settings required for automating installations, ranging from a small workgroup to the entire company. Settings include default entries for location and company name, file locations, Registry settings, shortcuts, and workstation security.
The custom maintenance wizard also lets administrators add, remove, or change an Office XP user's settings from a central management console, eliminating the need to get hands-on with every PC. Save My Settings, a similar feature, transfers a user's configuration to a notebook computer so that business travelers can retain a familiar Office XP look and feel while on the road, in the office, or at home.
In looking over Office XP's wide array of new features, we're heartened to see that with this upgrade, Microsoft appears to have listened to administrators and users and has responded by adding the features and enhancements they need. Far more in Office has stayed the same than has changed, but the additions are useful enough to potentially deliver meaningful savings in time and staff costs.