RSSLaunch Events Showcase Office XP
By Nate Mook and Mykel Nahorniak | Published June 1, 2001, 5:27 AM
Microsoft launched Thursday their much anticipated Office XP suite in 15 countries throughout the world. Conventions to celebrate the event were held in cities across the United States, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Washington DC also showcased the XP debut, with BetaNews in attendance.
Lacking much press coverage, the day was kicked off by Senior Executive at Microsoft, Jeff Raikes, with an introduction to Office XP and outline of key features. Individual demonstrations followed, offering further insight into functionality added by this latest release.
Microsoft held 'skill stations' around the arena give users and developers a chance to experience Office XP hands-on. Demo machines offered a look at one of the most intriguing features of the suite, SharePoint Team Services. SharePoint allows users to collaborate with co-workers from any PC running Internet Explorer 5.01 and higher. Employees may add surveys, announcements, links, documents, spreadsheets, and ideas to a centralized location for each member to view. SharePoint integrates directly with Outlook and other applications to enable document publication and task management via the Web.
Another highly touted asset of Office XP demoed Thursday was the 'smart tags' feature. Smart tags allow for pre-defined or custom actions to be performed on a piece of data. For example, a user can type a single word into a spreadsheet and utilize a smart tag function to query a database and populate the document with associated information.
The day closed with afternoon sessions detailing specific uses of Office XP in a business environment. Attendants also walked away with a bag of goodies containing a t-shirt, Visio 2002, MapPoint 2002, and other trial software.
System requirements for Office XP are very light, demanding only 24MB of RAM for Windows 98, 32MB for Windows Me or NT, and 64MB for Windows 2000 Professional. Office XP Standard requires a minimum 210MB of free hard disk space, while Professional requires 245MB. All versions require a monitor capable of displaying 800x600 at 256 colors or higher.
Office XP Standard will retail for $249 USD, with Professional Edition following at $329 USD. Microsoft has priced a Developer Edition at $549 USD, which features additional developer tools. Frontpage and Publisher 2002 will only be available in a Special Edition Professional release with IntelliMouse Explorer, at a cost of $479 USD. For more information on purchasing Office XP, visit microsoft.com.
I went to the Office XP event here in Manhattan and the suite really has some great new features that, at least at work, would be very useful. As far as the event itself, though, it left something to be desired. It's a live video feed from Redmond and it really went on too long. The folks on the show are the actual programmers and such, so they know their stuff, but they aren't that good at being entertaining. And when you have a show that's going to run for 2 hours +, that's important. Plus, they said on the invitation that attendees would receive a free version of the pre-release of Windows XP and full version of MapPoint 2002, but both of those they will mail to you in about a month... That was a bummer!
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|I've never understood why people rush to use MS Office.
THere are an amazing number of suites out there, which are not only free, but also do a better job than MS at 1/2 the installation size.
I personally prefer, 602 Pro Suite. It's ideal for all uses. A decent Text editor with almost all the features of MS Word and it also comes with a good spreadsheet and image editor.
What more do u need.
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|Office is very handy, especially in a business envionment. It's a very refined suite that you know everyone will be able to use. I admit there are individual applications out there that are just as good, but as a suite you can't beat Office's integration and feature set.
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|How many businesses and other people are using these other amazing office suites? The only office suite I have seen that is actually quite good (in my opinion) is StarOffice. However the majority of people usually share their documents/spreadsheets/presentations/etc with other people, hence using an incompatible office suite isn't an option for most people. And I do realise that StarOffice and many other office suites can read/write/convert from ms office formats...but based on the conversions of Word documents...they have a long way to go before you can seriously use it!
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|You wouldn't be asking that question if you use MS Office suite at Work to it's full potential. PERIOD
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|"decent", "almost all", "good" doesn't cut it.
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