RSSOffice 2003 Beta 2 Pulled From MSDN
By Nate Mook | Published February 19, 2003, 8:16 PM
UPDATED In a chaotic series of events Wednesday, Microsoft made available to MSDN subscribers the long awaited second beta of Office 11, leaving many beta testers bewildered, and then pulled the release shortly thereafter.
Microsoft was not expected to begin shipping Office 11 Beta 2 for at least another week, and official testers are normally given early access to such releases as a reward for their hard work. Instead, paying customers and Redmond partners were given first crack at the new Office, including OneNote and InfoPath.
After inquiries from the press, Microsoft acknowledged Beta 2 was posted to MSDN prematurely and swiftly removed the downloads. Company officials said the release was indeed the final Beta 2 code, but it was not meant to be publicly available at this time because printed materials were not yet complete.
The posting to MSDN confirmed speculation that Microsoft has christened the new suite "Office 2003." As with most MSDN software, downloads are available for each CD in ISO format. Office discs include Office 2003 Beta 2 MUI Pack, FrontPage 2003 Beta 2, InfoPath Beta 2, OneNote 2003 Beta 2, Publisher 2003 Beta 2, Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager Beta 2, SharePoint Portal Server 2.0 and Windows SharePoint Services 2003 Beta 2.
One highly touted feature new to Beta 2 is junk mail filtering in Outlook. By default, Outlook 2003 examines the content of a message and relocates obvious spam e-mail to a special folder. Users can customize the filter to their liking, and even tell Outlook to instantly delete junk mail.
According to the documentation, "Outlook uses state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research to evaluate whether a message should be treated as junk e-mail based on several factors, such as the time it was sent and the content of the message."
News of the MSDN release sparked an instant outcry from beta testers who felt snubbed by Microsoft. "That's really surprising if true," one tester remarked in a post to the Office 11 beta newsgroups.
Microsoft had previously told testers it would not make Office 11 available for download due to its large size, and beta coordinators told eager testers on Tuesday to expect Beta 2 kits by mail in the "coming weeks."
Adding to the confusion, Microsoft has not yet updated its SharePoint Team Services Web site to Beta 2 bits, as it had planned to do before the release. Beta coordinators informed testers the upgrade would occur around February 10.
An official announcement from Microsoft is expected shortly, along with information on a preview program that will enable non-testers to purchase Office 2003 Beta 2 for a small fee. Microsoft plans to ship the final version of Office 2003 by mid-year.
They got rid of Microsoft Photo Editor... I love Microsoft Photo Editor!!
I believe it was the most under rated tool Office included with its package... did everything for me. Convert to other formats, rotate and it also had low effect tools (like cartoonize ;-))
Sure you can buy Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro... but heck photo editor was a good tool.
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|I got my copy last week, only payed $11 for the beta. I realy like Outlook 2003 its streamlined kind of like the email client in OSX. Also word is made simple without all the bs options you never use plus Office 2003 includes new software to preview and orgenize graphic files. Yeah I know their is a bunch of options for that.
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|You got it already? Are you sure you have not been tricked? MSDN subscribers did not get it yet (as far as I know) and I certainly do not have mine although I am beta testing...
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|who knows where monekey got it from, some msdn subscribers were able to download before it was pulled.
all i got and burned to cd was publisher 2k3 beta 2. the rest (o2k3 fp2k3 onenote) are about halfway downloaded before they were pulled.
i hope i can resume them when they are released, lol.
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|I think this guy is pulling your chain or talking about Beta 1. However, many MSDN subscribers DID get it before it was pulled. The beta was up for a good 6 hours before it was taken down.
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|Is it possible to upgrade an Office XP install to Office 2003? I have many programs that tie in to Outlook 2002 (Desktop to Go, Documents to Go, Spamkiller, Outlink, etc.) and I'd like to be able to keep them functional as simply as possible.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Doug
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|is the product that bad?
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|its already shipping to beta testers. i am one myself, and i recieved the confirmation email yesterday
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|Quote from the Microsoft e-mail you received:
"This message is in regards to your address information. In the coming weeks, we will be shipping your Beta 2 kit for the Office 11 and Office Family applications."
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|"its already shipping to beta testers"..
you must not be a good beta tester to think they are shipping, or you can not read proper english.
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|That is correct that it's not shipping yet. I got the same address verification, but it'll ship soon.
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|Yes, it says:
"A definitive delivery date is not available at this time. We’re sorry, but inquiries regarding a ship date will not receive a response."
So they don't know themselves.
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|Is anyone else having trouble with betaplace? I received the beta acceptance email with my Beta ID and password. After I entered my User ID in the site I returned the next day and am having a horrible time loging in to the site. And it does not recognize me as enrolled in any betas. And my User ID/Password do not working on the Beta NNTP server.
If anyone knows what is going it'd be nice if you could tell me. ankurpatel@prodigy.net
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|Well, I didn't have trouble getting to the betaplace site, but they seem to have changed a few things there in recent days. Try the site again. Just like you, I also received the confirmation email and the site tells me that I am not enrolled in any Betas at this time too. Now, Microsoft mentions something about checking to see if your email address is valid before they will send out the disks. It allows two weeks for people to correct their email address before they are removed from the Beta program. So I figure that the disks won't go out for at least two weeks after receipt of the confirmation email.
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|Has anyone received it yet?
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