First Look Microsoft Office 2003

The worldwide community of Office users totals more than 300 million people (now that's a big family!), and the needs and wishes of the audience are as diverse as the countries and industries they live and work in. Their experience levels range from novice to advanced user to developer/expert. Some users would choose speed over power. Others want greater flexibility with third- party products. Still others would like the new Office to be more secure, more stable, or more streamlined in one area or another. All want easier access to information, the ability to smoothly apply data across the range of applications, and processes and procedures that can be personalized to provide solutions for their own unique work challenges.

Office 2003 is designed specifically to meet the biggest hurdles that people who work with information typically face:

• Information Fatigue. We deal with lots of data-from reports and Web sites to meetings and phone calls. We listen to presentations, watch television, hear Web broadcasts, and go to seminars. We receive thousands of e mails per week, subscribe to online newsletters, and visit discussions and newsgroups. Information flies at us from all directions at all times, in a huge array of forms. How do we sift through the glut of data we absorb and keep only what is useful for our particular job, team, or company? The tools in Office 2003 for grabbing notes, recording ideas, and sharing thoughts instantly enable you to get hold of and act on ideas as they occur, reducing their chances of being buried in a virtual pile of not-so-important reading.

• Inefficient collaboration. The idea of workgroups is terrific, but it often requires a long evolution. How many people worked on your last annual report? Who managed the process? How many hours did your manager spend trying to find suitable meeting times and places? Did using a team approach save you time or cost you more? The new Office 2003 includes important enhancements for working collaboratively, including a new meeting workspace service that helps you organize and facilitate meetings online.

• Disconnected islands of data. Does this sound like your office? Imagine that Accounting prepared a document last spring that described each of the products in your 2002 line, breaking down the costs according to your various departments. As you prepare your proposal for the three new products you want to introduce in 2004, you find that the document was created in Word but was not part of an Excel spreadsheet, which means that when a manager corrected the amounts later in the year, the new totals were never updated. So you have a choice: You can use the previously corrected document and make the cost corrections by hand, or you can use the Excel spreadsheet with the correct values (but not the cost-center calculations you want), and re create the information you need. What a lot of work! Office 2003 helps you use your data more efficiently by providing Smart Documents, collaboration with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, improved smart tags, and increased support for XML, which enables you to store your data independent of its form and use it to produce a variety of end results.

• Lack of business process integration. Even in the smoothest- running businesses, a lot of overlap occurs in business process. One department replicates what another department is doing at the other end of the building. With enhanced collaboration features and improved support for XML, Office 2003 can help you cut down on duplication of effort and allow all departments to share access to information that would support each of their efforts in unique ways.

• Outdated and upgraded systems disconnect the usefulness of data. As businesses change and grow, their systems also change and grow. Most large organizations go through elaborate-and expensive-upgrade processes to ensure that important data migrates from generation to generation. But in many organizations, some data is simply left unusable in today's applications-and workers re-key existing information or scan piles of printouts to transfer information from old legacy systems to today's servers. Office 2003 integrates into the core applications industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML), allowing organizations to store, access, and publish data from almost any system in an unlimited number of forms.

• Underutilization of productivity tools. The core applications in Office are so feature-laden that many businesses don't use them fully; people tend to perform a specific number of tasks with each program without a sense of how the programs could work together to improve and accelerate business processes. Office 2003 increases productivity in each of the core applications-Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, and FrontPage-and enhances the easy way the applications work together to make you more productive and efficient.

• Lack of true mobility. Many of today's information workers work on the move. They travel to meet clients; they make business calls on cell phones in the airport; they meet in coffee shops and gyms as well as boardrooms, courtrooms, and classrooms. As a people on the go, information workers need flexible ways to gather the ideas and information they encounter along the way. Laptop computers provide one way to capture information on the run, but even the smallest laptops can be more trouble than they're worth in a fast-paced brainstorming meeting. Office 2003's support for input from mobile devices-including the new Tablet PC with enhanced Ink support- gives mobile users yet another way to capture and use important in the-moment information.

• Concern for security and integrity of data. One of the obstacles to easy collaboration and document sharing (two key components in effective teamwork) has been concern for the protection of proprietary data. How do you control the distribution and modification of proprietary documents in your organization? In Office 2003, Microsoft introduces Information Rights Management, a feature that enables you to protect your information by controlling what others can do with it.

Any new release of a software product will fix what fell short in the previous version, but Office 2003 brings much more to the table than corrective measures. Although Office 2003 does improve Outlook clunkiness, increase stability, and beef up security, the exciting innovations in Office 2003 are likely to inspire you to take a closer look. Whatever your particular obstacles might be right now-communication dead ends, repetition of effort, security holes, underuse of existing data and processes, workgroup struggles, or something else-Office 2003 can solve them. In the next section, you'll see how this version of Office is a new, highly flexible, and fast platform that enables you to capture information instantly, share ideas easily, work with data efficiently, and produce results in a variety of forms that fit the tasks you want to accomplish.