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Microsoft Office 2003 - Reviews, Overviews, Issues
securitas writes "The first users of Microsoft's Office 2003 are weighing in and the response is mixed. The new Outlook has received a favorable response, but the mantra seems to be there's little reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features. Meanwhile, Bill Gates dismissed the open source competition. One of the new features - self-destructing documents - seems to have caused some confusion, because 'Microsoft says the new feature is not designed to remove all traces of a file' and MS spokesman Mike Pryke-Smith says, 'The message will still be in various places', so emails will not cleanly self-destruct. A related issue is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management, which may shut out Mac users. PC World has a detailed review of Office 2003 which sums things up well."
Given some of the crap that Windows programs leave when you try to uninstall them, I don't think I'd trust an email to be completely removed from the system.
Emerald Astrology
Are like wet ducks in the desert... it's just not quite right.
It doesn't matter what my feelings are about it because in the end it will be preinstalled on all new systems anyway whether you like it or not.
A related issue is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management, which may shut out Mac users.
So, I have been hearing this concern raised a number of times, and I have to wonder....Why has Microsoft not taken the time or made the effort to answer the question? Their Mac business unit is one of the most profitable divisions, so one would think that this concern would have made it up the corporate ladder.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Cool, know we know what we're going to see in the next version of OpenOffice.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Why have cotton when you can have silk?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
And cotton is made from sheep.
I haven't had a need for MS Office in a long time, ok so I need to type a document, 9 times outta 10 I can get by with a basid editor like notepad or wordpad, need to make something a little heavier? An invoice or bid? OpenOffice does a decent enough job, hell I don't even use a handful of all the features OO has either even when I'm making something "professional" (aka business related) and when I save I usually use the lowest common denominator so I can be assured the recipient can read it (however I typically fax the document anyway).
Maybe I'm a minority but even if I were given a copy of MS Office I wouldn't even bother installing it.
--- www.f-theocean.com
Since when are Self destructing documents a "new feature?"
We all saw that coming so I figured we might as well get it over with.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
And why would they include a feature like that? picture bill saying "its cool fo shizzy", SCO and the RIAA are trying to make money by destroying their user base, why not MS! i have cool sarcasm!
If my organization is indeed that paranoid, I would insist that document suffer at least a shred(1) if not the destruction of the entire hard disk.
This sounds like a rather half-assed solution.
I don't even need to read the article.
- Takes known standards such as ASCII, fucks them up, uses them for itself.
- UI now Uglier Than Ever! (Stolen directly from QDOS)
- Company run by a raving lunatic.
- Consumes more resources than previous versions, doesn't share.
- Tends to force its will upon the user. Using weapons.
Just wait until the IRM server gets comprimized, there is no such thing privacy in the digital world, If don't want something leaked, don't put it on a computer connected to the internet or has a disk drive on it. I say it gets cracked tonight!
Can we get Charlton Heston to be the new Vi spokesman? I just wanna see him go to computer conferences, hold up the Vi source code printed on old style dot matrix printer paper and say "From my dead cold hands"
--
Bah, OpenOffice is terrible... I had a course last semester that required me to read numerous presentations in Power Point format. Instead of pirating the software, I decided to do the "ethical" thing and download OO to view the files. As if reading Power Point documents wasn't painful enough before, adding in horrendous load times, an even uglier interface and an inexplicable lack of key navigation features made it totally unbearable. The fact that it's free does not mean it isn't crap. It's merely free crap. That's my 2 cents...
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
I had a 2000 cd in hand but 2000 takes so long to install I figure just go light and use 98. Barely notice the difference between home and office xp at work.
This is not a new feature - all office versions I have ever used had this. And, while not removing all traces of the document, they rendered it completely unusable.
This is definitely an area in which the open source products need to catch up!
BTW, the only reliable way to recover at least most of the content of Office-self-shredded documents that I have found was to open them with OpenOffice.org, which does a much better job at reading partly corrupted files.
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
``The distance between what we have and what the free software has is greater today than it's ever been,'' he said. The new Office product's biggest competitors, he said, were its predecessors, most recently Office XP, released two years ago
that's correct, the distance is greater because it's lagging further and further behind than opensource free software.
my blog
Is Outlook properly multi-threaded now? We use 2000 at work, and it's really frustrating to not be able to have a big message downloading from the Exchange server and read others at the same time.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I was typing an email in LookOut 2003 today and typed a smiley face like ":)". It automatically turned it into a smiley-face character. Oy Gevalt.
I'd say the biggest improvement is that HTML emails don't automatically load images. A little "x" icon appears in place of the image, along with a tiny message "click to view- not loaded to protect your privacy" or something like that. In LookOut 2000, you had to unplug your ethernet cable before reading something that might be spam.
Software, or digital content, doesn't wear out. Even if a company could produce a perfect piece of software, office suite or otherwise, it'd be detrimental to do so under current business models. "Software as service" subscriptions could address this, but customers don't seem to go for it. To keep revenue coming in customers have to be convinced, cajoled, or forced into upgrades.
OK, none of this is news to anyone...but what are some viable commercial alternatives? The Open Source model tends to favor charging for support/service, one time charges for feature creation/customization, and donations; micropayments for content has been tried; and Macromedia and Adobe have had success with a "free-to-view pay-to-create" model.
The current "artificial upgrade" seems unethical and possibly doomed. Are traditional business obsolete in the digital arena? What's next?
The general opinion seems to be that Office 2003 doesn't offer all that much new for the average user. It's main benefits are to do with workgroup integration and IRM. Target users for IRM would be big businesses. However one possible problem is that laws in the US require all email records for X number of years to be kept stored (and accessible) in case of say an Enron style investigation. This could greatly inhibit the takeup of IRM in big business, esp. for things like emails that self-destruct after T period of time or have restrictions on who can read them. One thing I read in a newspaper today (The Australian) is that a MS spokesperson (in response to the audit trail concerns) claims that these self-destructing emails are still there on the HD but are simply not readable, but an IT professional should be able to easily recover them in readable format. If this is true it means that the security provisions of IRM are useless as it means there is an easy way for people to break the security coded in by MS themselves (which will soon probably exist as a downloadable tool on the internet if it doesn't already).
I can appreciate the value of the concept of self-destructing documents. We all know that once information becomes digital, the potential of controlling its integrity is questionable at best, but that notwithstanding, it could be a useful feature.
However, my concern over the abuse of this feature overshadows any benefit it may offer. If documents, or even worse, all files, now have flags associated with them that could trigger not easily interruptable deletion, you can imagine the total havoc an il-behaved program could wreak on a user's system.
Can you imagine worms and viruses that mass flag files for automatic destruction at random dates? Receive a nasty e-mail or visit the wrong web site and have it cause files to dissapear months later with virtually no evidence or detectable agent? That's scary.
Of course, I'm sure Microsoft has carefully considered these circumstances so we have nothing to worry about.
Now Microsoft will have an excuse to avoid turning documents over during the discovery processes of the various lawsuits against them.
"Honest, your honor. The document self destructed the day we were supposed to turn it over."
- Format painter (not fill format, thats not the same)
- Wordart, so many people use that you need to pry it from their cold dead hands
- Selection Column support, once you tried it you can't go back
- Make it easier to insert non standard characters with logical keyboard shortcuts
- Support for a non annoying office assistant, that little lightbulb is not good. Have something like a penguin or Seagull (since this is openioffice).
- Improvements to the filters, so it dosen't randomly insert bold and italics in my presentations
- Support for the SVG graphics standard, other OpenSource graphics packages are standardizing on it
- Make it even faster, OpenOffice 1.1 is still slow
- And finally, support for CTRL+SPACE
I'm just a regular office monkey, so if there are any code monkeys around here, please concider my feature requests....the king of floating document formats. Once again, Microsoft is changing it's formats, in an attempt to force users to upgrade their software, as well as lockout 3rd party apps and OS's.
Here at my college, we have had such a problem with various Word formats (from student and faculty home machines) that we're pushing saving as RTF. The problem with this is that there's a large segment of users out there that have no clue as to what a file format is, much less why they should go to any further trouble than just hitting save.
There's always several, usually at the end of a term, who can't print from their computer and need a paper printed up (class is in 5 minutes). Said paper is done on some 5 year old Romanian version of Office Works Lite and nothing else but Office 98 on a Mac can read it.
'Course I don't have a floppy disk on my Mac and have to walk across campus (with wailing student in tow-"I need this for class or I'll fail!") to the Mac lab and then spend 5 more minutes (that I could be surfing pr0n or taking over the world in SMACX) explaining that the print button on the tool bar really does do the same thing on a Mac, and yes, it is pretty, just print your friggin' paper, you overpaying, coddled, mama's child!
I drank what? -- Socrates
It's a rather simple problem: A user with some kind of credentials opens a document, to find that it's encrypted.
Within the document is a reference to the authentication server that has the certificate needed to decrypt the file. The user's credentials are then passed to the server (a-la XML over SSL/HTTPS) and the credentials are either sufficient (and the server passed back the certificate) or they aren't and the file remains unreadable.
I see the problem as:
Really - what's the big deal here?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Oh dear...
I sure hope all those bits that suddenly function as shrapnel don't cause dents in my HD's platters. I'm not quite sure I would enjoy having my HD flakked to kingdom-come...
Hate me!
How is lawful access to protected email regulated in Office System 2003? Does Microsoft present any information on this?
Kristian
Oh Great Gates, Isn't it better to build bridges (Mac) than destroy documents?
Trix are for kids!
Virus scanners and firewalls can't examine encrypted or self-destructing Office documents. So this could provide a new way for Office-based attacks to bypass defenses.
I'm not sure why, but a couple of links were removed from the edited post. I haven't yet used MS Office 2003, so I'm not in a position to say whether or not the PC World review 'sums things up pretty well' (not my words) or not. Some of the other edits do clarify, however. As for the "spectacular-conglomeration dept.", if that referred to this post, a tip of the hat to simoniker.
For anyone who cares, here's how it looked as submitted, with an additional Google link for PC Pro article to bypass their registration page. The interesting thing is that PC Pro changed the headline which was definitive about shutting out Macs to something less than absolute.
Let's not forget about Word XML (and it ain't just BLOB!), say what you will, but I've been developing with their schema for some time and it's covering all the bases when it comes to Word I/O (which is 90% of the company I work for's income!).
Now if somehow we can get Microsoft to adopt XForms 1.0 (booyah!!!) and drop InfoPath I think everyone will be happier. Or wait, did Slashdot have a story on XForms 1.0 (!?! I hope they did and I just missed it!)
crazy dynamite monkey
I know this much: this will be disabled to send or recieve at every lawfirm in the world. You are simply not going to read something that you can't print out, copy, etc and will expire in four hours.
What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies. Its a shame really.
Not to mention they can't plug the "analog hole" namely the fact that your monitor is a passive listening device and as such screenshots cannot be blocked. Even if they block it on the OS level a cheap digital camera will do in a pinch.
I'd say the biggest improvement is that HTML emails don't automatically load images.
The PC World review described this feature, and it sounds like Microsoft has done this exactly the same way that Ximian Evolution does it.
Trolls can try to make hay with that if they like, but I say it's just the obviously right way to handle the problem, so it's no shock that MS did it the same way.
This feature was the one "killer feature" that convinced me to switch to Ximian Evolution. I don't want spammers to be able to confirm my email address using HTML mail. It's good for Outlook users that MS added this feature.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And not much more. Of course the big question is when the OSS community will stop whining they don't need all this new stuff and duplicate the more interesting features in their own products. It seems to happen like this with every new version of ms office. Hell, openoffice even includes a clippy clone (equally useless) now.
I'm not really interested in ms office new features even though some of the enhancements in outlook look like I could use them (I use thunderbird so I can already have a 3 column layout, seems like one of the first duplicated features).
Jilles
How many of you really use 10% of all the features Microsoft Office has to offer. If you don't use more than 70% of the features MS Office offers, just install Openoffice for Windows and Linux. For gtk/gnome users, Ximian's Openoffice is an absolute must. I think MS Office 2003 is going to be a failure. It's a nice product, but I don't thinks it's worth a priced upgrade giving the fact that openoffice provides you with more than 70% of what most of us use MS Office for, and for free.
Gates dismissed the challenge from open-source programs such as Linux, which is gaining adherents in the public and private sectors.
``The distance between what we have and what the free software has is greater today than it's ever been,'' he said. The new Office product's biggest competitors, he said, were its predecessors, most recently Office XP, released two years ago.
i think he's talking about the size of the
software and the price, not the usefullness.
After the specified expiration date, when your PC tries to get the key, the server says "sorry, too late." Nothing gets deleted from your PC. You still have the file, but just no key to unlock it.
- Outlook uses F9 to do a manual send/receive, but I'm used to F5 from OE. Unfortunately it looks like Outlook does not let you customize keyboard shortcuts?
- Hitting the close button is a lot easier than hitting the minimize button, and I want to use the close button to minimize Outlook to the tray, but it doesn't look like this is possible. I need to keep Outlook open because I want to have it continually check for e-mail only when I'm home, and if I let it check while it's closed then it's a hassle to turn off when I leave.
- Outlook top-posts by default. Is this acceptable in e-mail? I'm pretty against this. I turned on > quoting, but it still starts me on top of the quoted message and includes a bunch of headers I don't need. It would be nice to only quote the To and From headers and start me under the message.
- Adobe Acrobat 6.0 insists on having its "Attach as Adobe PDF" button on certain toolbars even if I remove it. I got around this one by moving all the buttons to another toolbar and disabling the standard one.
- I thought they made a big deal about killing Clippy, but when I opened Word, there he was.
If anyone knows of solutions to the first three I'd appreciate it. Overall I love the new Outlook though, I'm finally leaving OE behind.How about Debian/Sid then?
I know it's slashdot and everything, but it really should be whose.
Who's represents "who is."
Thanks,
Your friendly neighborhood anal Slashdot reader.
Microsoft Office 3d...
-K
I laughed when I read this.. perhaps they really are distributing this in order to make people use their software:
Microsoft dished out evaluation copies of Orifice to the assembled hax. When we've got a spare day or two we'll investigate the whole caboodle and let you know.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
This is all pretty amusing. On the one hand, we have a bunch of zealots (at least half of the posters--or maybe just half of those who get modded up, which is worse) who want to rail about the next step in M!cr0$0f7's plan to kill babies and burn churches. Now, these are the same people that cherish freedom of information everywhere, and are currently boycotting 20 different organizations because it truly makes a difference.
This idea of expiring access is not new. In fact, PGP supports public key expiration, such that you could implement this sort of thing with PGP. I guess the whole idea of encryption is evil now, eh?
Find the headless fwibble before midnight!
Start copying OneNote. I am posting AC-like because it's hard to admit that Microsoft has actually come up with something I like. Damn. I feel unclean. Someone mail me some anthrax so I can get sprayed down by those hazmat guys...
Microsoft confirms its allout focus on enterprise computing in this release. Combined with Windows server 2003, which is doing exceptionally well in the Enterprise arena, they are determined to assume the market dominance in server computing that they have already achieved in the consumer area. Of course there is no reason for the home user to upgrade. I use Office 97 (on a slow machine) at home and wouldn't dream of wasting money on any upgrade. For home or stand alone computing Mozilla offerings combined with OpenOffice are a nobrainer for any computer literate end consumer with a reasonably fast machine. Will Microsoft win the Enterprise war? You bet they will. Will Opensource survive and flourish? You can bet on that also. The present and future environment is a win-win for both approaches.
The idea of self-destructing documents just brings back the idea that "Information wants to be free." I think that this is a brilliant idea, not just applied to computer codes and what not. Just look at the lengths people and organizations will go to in order to stop information from spreading, and fail in spite of it all.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
how to create a vi text file:
0. type "vi filename", wait less than 3 seconds.
1. press [i].
2. insert your text.
3. press [ESC] then [Z][Z] (twice).
>if I can't "guess" how to do something, then it's poorly designed.
Your idea of "poor design" is poorly thought out. If you read the manual (like you would any other program, including MS-Word with its accompanying text, help menu, or paperclip) then would you still consider VI shit? Do you even understand why VI was designed the way it was? How about this: can you come up with an effective way to edit two files simultaneously? Now add in the ability to access the command-line within the same program. Now add in the ability to edit these files thousands of miles away through a ssh connection using a Wyse-60 terminal (ie. no local memory storage, ONE connection, ONE screen). Can you do this in Word? Thought not! I don't call that program shit, I call it a godsend when you have limited resources and you need to get the job done. OTOH, I call users shit when they think they have any authority to criticize objects beyond the scope of their understanding -IMO.
Hence, VI was designed for people who will read the manual and actually have a use for it. Contrary to your opinion, the GUI is NOT the most efficient way to run your OS, many apps written decades ago are still thriving and better written than most of your great GUI proggies, and a GUI interface is meant for graphics, NOT to excuse your lack of computer proficiency. VI was obviously not designed for you! Better stick to criticizing products in your own "weight-class" (ie. MS-Word), chum. Leave the "poorly designed" products to the experts. Next time, RTFM.
Now there's a new one ...
Are you saying that MS's software is secure enough to withstand attacks from corrupted servers?
Uhm, this is MS remember. IIS. Helloooooo.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Can we put this under "Comedy" too?
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Nobody mentioned system requirements :
- Microsoft Windows(R) 2000 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later; or Windows XP or later
The total requirements are here. Clearly there are still a lot of people out there without the service packs etc, and all you lot who still have plenty of old boxes running 98/98SE - you'll have to upgrade of course.
They say 233MHz/128MB RAM minimum, but they must be on crack if they can blithely say that as a minimum for Office 2003 with at least Win2K on the box, unless you have a severe patience overdose.
I just hope antiword can keep up with the format so that I can continue to read .DOCs on any ANSI terminal that I see fit. Antiword is quite simply the most useful command line tool for reading email from all my lusers who think that sending me a .DOC attachment somehow makes my life more wonderful ("Hey, you can print it and it comes out really nice..." - as if I ever freakin' print email, you moron.)
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The quoted article says that the best new feature was the change to the vertical panes in Outlook. That rang some bells, so I looked at the options of my copy of Thunderbird 0.3, and there it was: the option to go vertical in three panes.
"Several of Microsoft's MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals, also served as beta testers for Office 2003."
So what is this MVP thing? Microsoft Victimized Programmer? I tried looking it up on the web but it's a very nebulous thing. Sniff Gates' butt enough and they might let you put that after your name for a year. I see nothing that prevents me from putting it after my name as well. Hmmm.... Starting tomorrow I'm going to actually put MVP after my sig on every online forum I participate in! It's not like I'm pretending to be a doctor or a lawyer or *gasp* an MSCE perfessional, is it? Yes. That is what I will do. It will cause chaos and confusion everywhere! I can just see the naive newbies now as a real live MVP starts to dis Microsoft products at every turn.
Having been a consultant for over 8 years, most business users I know still haven't grasped the feature set from Office 95, little alone '97, 2000, XP and now 2003. The reason they upgrade has largley been due to compatibility issues (users unable to open documents sent to them buy users with newer versions).
The "need for features" is not because most users need them, but rather Microsoft needs them to make the case for upgrading.
Open Office, Star Office and other suites will eventually win over Microsoft Office. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Haha, Microsoft learned from the anti-trust case, no no, not to be competitive, but rather, that some emails ought to be destroyed after being read by someone. The supreme Court found out that Microsoft backed up ALL of their emails, and were forced to turn them over for the Anti-Trust case. At least Microsoft is doing something with the trial.
The authentification will be done by a server chosen by the author.
Anyone can set up his own server or maybe use a thirdparty provider. And the authentification server will not see the documents themselves, but will receive a document hash and the public key of the reader.
I'm not sure whether access rights will be stored on the server or in the document header. The first variant would allow you to change permissions retroactively. But if you loose the data on the server, you'll be in trouble.
I don't have any special knowlwge about what MS is doing. But the described approach sound most sensible to me.
I see you're having trouble filling Microsoft's bank balance. Would you like some help?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Find the jade fwibble before midnight!
Microsoft has on numerous occasions blushed an awfully dark colour of red when internal e-mails and correspondence were leaked or made part of the public record in court cases.
Information may want to be free, but the folks at MS have evidently found a workaround.
You know, animals never have war.
War is an invention of mankind.
Install Linux. Install lame-ass Windows emulator POS on Linux. Download Powerpoint viewer. Run. You: Sweaty Glans.
Microsoft have just achieved to create self-destructing documents although they have perfectly succeeded to create a self-destructing OS since 95!
I'm not with you 99%.
How many MS Office users (any version) use anymore than the most basic features. AFAIK im one of the few that even bothers to use style settings for heading trees etc. Im willing to bet that you could drop-in replace around 90% of MS Office installations with OpenOffice and the user would barely notice (even the start up time is pretty decent now). I just feel sorry for people like this who actually paid the full price for Office and i think we should start a charity to help them?
"Sell a man an Office license and he'll be productive until the next upgrade. Teach a man the url for OpenOffice and he'll be productive forever"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Ok for the users at home. Let me see if I get this right.
$229 for Word
$229 for Excel
$109 for Outlook (Checking email is expensive)
$229 for PowerPoint(For presentations at work and stuff)
--------------
$796 Total
Now if we look at say... OpenOffice.
$0 for Word Equivalent
$0 for Excel Equivalent
$0 for Outlook Equivalent (ie Evolution)
$0 for PowerPoint Equivalent
--------------------
TOTAL $0
Now considering that the start up cost for a home user is $796 (not including Windows XP), and then a linux user can type "emerge openoffice" (for gentoo users) and just download it for other users (ie Redhat), I know were I stand. Benifits of open source.
1. You don't have to call to activate your micro$hit.
2. It won't cost you an arm and leg
3. You don't have to walk to the store. (although you could and buy the nice prepackaged distro's with manuals and such)
4. If you need help, customer service is in the forums or on an IRC a few clicks away, as opposed to 200+ dollars in long distance trying to explain to some micro$hit service rep that you can start your computer anymore because outlook decided to somehow fry your CMOS because of a new vulnerability.
5. Did I mention it's FREE?
Nuff said.
meant to annoy the regular joe and still not be of any help to anyone at all at the end of the day.
enough of these and it will be a real self destruct(once the users learn the hard way that it is really just mental masturbator for phb's, "great now i can just say anything i want on emails and nobody will have a copy of it!!!!!").
drive-by-management by email.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Does this mean OpenOffice is possibly a violation of the DMCA?
I use openoffice. Everyone I know is moving to openoffice at home. Even the ones that use MS office don't pay for it.
But Bill Gates knows something that most people overlook: He knows that selling to home users is irrelevant! All he needs to do is come up with some reason to force companies to upgrade, and they will. DRM isn't a reason, it's just a lockdown "feature" to make everything else less viable. The real upgrade force push comes from two directions:
1) Lack of format compatability. Once someone starts using it and sending out files, everyone will need it or not be able to read the files.
2) The basic nature of companies is to upgrade and turn over equipment, over time.
Bill will win this one. And the next one. And the next one...
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Actually, Microsoft is including protection against the "print-screen-hole".
Ok. Dunno where I read it, but it was quite recent (after they released all that Office 2003-info). You'll all have to trust me. Ok? :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I did some pretty extensive testing with Outlook's self-destruct feature yesterday and here's what I learned -
- Expired *unread* email will be deleted from a user's inbox. It's not deleted from the server and any mail administrator can recover it.
- If the message has been marked read it's not deleted. Same thing for mail routed by a rule.
I think it's a pretty handy feature - I send a lot of mail that requires either a quick response or no response. An example -boss -
If you get this before your 1:00 meeting can you bring up (insert rant of choice)?
Not too hard to understand.
Messages that are marked read that have expired show up in Outlook with a line drawn through the two-line preview. They can still be opened and read. I find the feature pretty handy.
Also, OL2003 appears to be a bit more intuive for the end user than previous versions. The thing that scares the crap out of me (and would anybody else that does direct customer support) is that it *looks* different from previous versions. That's often enough to freak out your more non-technical users, who call the helpdesk because they can't figure out how to work their shiny new email program.
I like it well enough that we're gonna skip Office XP and upgrade users from Office 2k to Office 2003 when we do the big WinXP deployment next spring.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
What do you mean that's all, what about:
Putting a password on the document
Using PGP on the email
Putting the document on a network drive with restricted access intead of emailing it
Where I work we use all the above (and maybe more), I think current technology certainly does have one or two improvements on "confidential".
Oh yeah, I forgot, he's a marketroid, can't believe anything he says, never mind...
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
Now if they could only add a self destructing office binder, I just might buy it.
Regulatory compliance requires routine recordkeeping of customer and other communications. That includes emails and documents. You can be sure brokerage firms and their regulators will have new policy challenges with self-destructing emails and documents.
Why is their chart done up as a JPEG image? They're a computer magazine, aren't they? Hell, I think it might have been from their pages that I first learned the difference between DCT and RLE; they should know better than to convert a graphic to a JPEG!
Remember kiddies--if it's a solid block of color, use PNG or GIF. Otherwise, use JPEG.
If only they listed contact addresses for the authors on the article.
Jouster
They are necessary due to the nature of email. Emails are used for casual conversations without the feedback that is no essential to such communication. Think of all the flame wars that have been avoided by judicious use of emoticons.
but the mantra seems to be there's little reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features
This was a pretty stupid statement, IMO. One should *NEVER* upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features. This has always been the way a good admin/user worked. Anyone upgrading for the sake of upgrading is quite simply, an idiot.
Does this new rights system use encryption? Can it keep the "Administrator" user from reading documents that the higher-ups don't want him to read? I'm sure that if this were true, some companies would see this as a big feature. Right now, you have to either trust your server admin, or keep your files on your laptop and hope that it doesn't get stolen/they don't get eaten.
Otherwise, then yes, I can't see what huge benefits this has over a fileserver with proper permissions (or, say, Linux+XFS+ACLs if you need finer-grained access control).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Ellen Feiss is gonna have a field day.
Yeah, seriously. Everyone knows that this idea was outlined years ago by the excellent technological documentaries Mission Impossible, Get Smart and Inspector Gadget. What do they teach kids in school these days?
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Do you know *how* MS became interested in DRM/IRM? Many of their own emails and edocuments were used against them in the federal anti-trust trial. They were determined that this would *never* happen to them again. So, they began researching technologies that would somehow make these documents unuseable (damage, delete, encrypt) or unviewable unless the user was authorized by them to view it.
Today we have Office 2003. It's just the begining. It came out of a need for corporate criminals to cover their illegal deeds, and now their selling it as a grand, new feature... only in America.
I predicted this the first time I heard about Microsoft's content "protection" feature. People complain that Palladium-style DRM will prevent people from booting Linux, but that would be far too blatent. Instead, "protections" like these are going to turn Microsoft file formats, which are hard enough to reverse engineer already, into proprietory files protected from reverse-engineering by the DMCA. How long will it be before some sort of content-protection functionality is needed to open *all* Office documents, not just ones that specify certain protections? After all, Windows users would never know --- Office will dutifully open encrypted letters from grandma, but a Linux user will be shut out, even if he should be able to read the document.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?" Edward Tufte ppt poster
They put down open source when releasing their Office suite but include Ogg Vorbis in Halo: Combat Evolved their flagship X-Box now PC game.
It seems that the sales and marketing people find it inferior but the developers don't.
Sure, Access 2003 opens the file, it just doesn't work right anymore. ;)
Access XP broke many an Access 2000 files that had extensive VBA (especially calls to com components written in C/C++). I know, I had to fix some of them.
This also happened with the transition from Access 97 to 2000. So even if the file format is exactly the same, it's easy to break older files. Do you think Access 2003 might do this again? The track record is looking bad so far.
Sensible? User choice? This is Microsoft you are talking about. Remember the company that makes you stick in your orignal CD and reboot if you change your hostname or IP number. It's also the company that won't let you store M$ updates locally, so everytime a computer gets adware or virus hosed, you have do download everything all over again but don't give you a choice on which updates you want and stick nasty EULAs in the updates. We are talking about one paranoid control freak of a company that has demonstrated it could care less about user choice or reason when those things get in the way of user control. When has Microsoft ever made a peer computing modeled product where the end user's machine was an equal player? If there is a way Bill Gates can charge anyone money for the service, you can bet that his software will force the user to pay. A central server completely out of the user's control offered as a "service" to enable this "feature" is very much a possibility.
Now what happens when that central server gets the next Blaster? Everyone is screwed. Nothing new, It's like hotmail, but they are going to pretend you have some input.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft continues down the road of proprietary file formats - once again cutting out a broad swath of users for the further profit of M$ - with the added benefit of locking niave users into the windows OS in the bargain.
I think the key thing to observe here is the 76% profit margin on Office software - of a 9.2 billion dollar revenue stream, 7 billion dollars is profit. Can anyone say Microsoft Office software is 'way overpriced'?
Their business plan is evil on several levels. Shame on Microsoft for profiteering and removing the transparency of communications within public corporations - one more check and balance to corporate greed down the tubes.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It seems that technology keeps getting added to software that has little to do with the software's primary function. The mantra invoked is always "security" or "privacy". By catering to paranoia and the lowest common denominator in our societies we are creating bloated crippled software. The upshot is that we have wordprocessing software that creates documents that become unreadable, and music software that creates music that is unplayable. Software is hardly ever "bulletproof", so I can see that soon I'll get calls from friends using Office 2003 about documents that just "dissapeared" or became "corrupted" , just like I get calls now about CDs burned that won't play in their stereos (actually, I get calls now about documents dissapearing in WORD). What's next, WOM(Write-only memory)??
Isn't this just common sense that applies to any software? If it does everything you need and works well for you, don't upgrade. I don't care what software it is or how much it does or doesn't cost, I'm not upgrading if I don't need anything in the new version. No (sensible) person recommends you upgrade to the newest Linux kernel every time one is released if you have an old stable one that does exactly what you want perfectly. Why would MS Office be any different? The only reason to upgrade is new features. If you don't need the new features, you don't need to upgrade.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Two major new things in Office 2003 are support for XML schemas and DRM.
With XML, it appears, you can constrain something like Excel spreadsheet by an XML schema and attach it to some kind of backend XML storage. Also ability to create your own XML schemas. If these features work as advertized, it is kickass and no opensource (or closed-) solution comes even close.
With DRM you can limit who can view and update your docs, set expiration dates. etc. All in the familiar, integrated desktop environment. This is godsend to businesses who are growing and cannot rely on simple folder naming conventions for their document needs yet cannot afford real ERP/CRM system. This is like 75% of US businesses.
Collaboration with SharePoint server is pretty good too.
Advance of Linux as a server platform forced Microsoft to innovate and Windows 2000 and 2003 became very capable server platforms.
Just like that, the mere hint of upcoming Linux desktop is now forcing MS to innovate in the Office/Desktop arena.
My question is when OpenSource will stop following and take the lead in this area as well?
OpenOffice is nice but it (plus Evolution) is functionally compatible to MS Office 97.
Is something like Chandler going to become OpenSource Office darling?
the writer of such incriminating material can be like "SELF DESTRUCTION IN 3 DAYs SO I WILL NOT GO JAIL!"
The reader sees something juicy, sneaks in a camera, and giggles uncontrollably at the naivete of the writer.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
``The distance between what we have and what the free software has is greater today than it's ever been,''
I've never heard a better reason to use Open Office. But i don't think he meant it that way.
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
It seems to me that all of the new Windows with connectivity is really waiting for something more malicious than your average virus or trojan to come along and really screw with you.
This new office set up just smells like another moment of doom. Although office products and software have been the usual "start up pick file work and close file" category, it just smells funny to me.
Windows has been self destructing for years now.
Wow! You used a version of Word over 6 years old and found problems in editing the document!
Because Word 97 sucked, that means all of Microsoft Office 2003 is "terrible!"
"Sufferin' succotash."
wasnt Vi a movie where the people came down in spaceships and turned out to be human munching lizards. I for wone welcome our new Lizard Overlords
I know there have been many times that sensitive file data has been rendered useless on my windows box. However, I have always been puzzled by why it would typically happen during a save or application exit. Gee and I thought that bright blue screen was a bug...silly me.
Once the doc is locked, OO isn't going to have the key to open it.
.doc, and even send documents in this format to friends, etc trying to spread the word about OpenOffice.org.
:)
I try to use Open Office formats [.sxw] instead of
I think OO would gain huge ground if people started using and sending its format instead of Microsoft's format as much as possible.
I mean for college students, it's a no brainer: M$ vs. OO (free!). Hmm... hard choice.
Scott
(I'll take my comments off the air.)
Like you said, with any piece of software, there's only so much "innovation" you can do, so no matter how long it takes, eventually OSS software will replace all proprietary software.
Of course, our governments can't allow this to happen, politicians need their campaign contributions, so expect to see legislation in the near future designed to slow the spread of OSS.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Ive seen several ads for an aerosol spray that will cause the surface of the object of which it is applied to become highly reflective, causing overexposure of the image.
Opens mail:
Damn Red light Photo ticket
Well, I noticed a "M$" in there, so I'm sure your post will be immature and baseless. Let's see, shall we?
Sensible? User choice? This is Microsoft you are talking about.
Ah, I know exactly where this is headed.
Remember the company that makes you stick in your orignal CD and reboot if you change your hostname or IP number.
No, I don't remember that. Because it's not true. And never has been. I can only reasonably conclude that you are flat-out lying to push the anti-Microsoft Crusades, because you do not have to insert an original CD and reboot if you change your hostname or IP number.
It's also the company that won't let you store M$ updates locally, so everytime a computer gets adware or virus hosed, you have do download everything all over again but don't give you a choice on which updates you want and stick nasty EULAs in the updates.
Surprise, surprise--another outright falsehood, considering downloaded updates are stored in the WUpdate folder, and even SRS can store them and distribute them to clients on the network.
Of course, there is the instance of "M$," that bastion of 1998-era anti-Microsoft fanaticism that just never stops being clever and funny. Let's see how the rest of this post fares.
We are talking about one paranoid control freak of a company that has demonstrated it could care less about user choice or reason when those things get in the way of user control. When has Microsoft ever made a peer computing modeled product where the end user's machine was an equal player?
Considering most of the world uses Windows on their PCs, I'd say they're the equal players. Microsoft isn't "controlling" mine or anybody else's deskop. It sounds like you're being a ranting paranoid nut for the sake of it.
If there is a way Bill Gates can charge anyone money for the service, you can bet that his software will force the user to pay.
What "service?" How could he "force" anybody to pay anything? Is he going to hold a gun to your head?
A central server completely out of the user's control offered as a "service" to enable this "feature" is very much a possibility.
Oh, I see. You were talking about SRS. Well, you weren't, because you're so ignorant that you didn't know about it and went off on this paranoid lunatic rant, but the general idea of what you're talking about is SRS/IRM, which is a server you set up yourself on the network to handle updates and Information Rights Management.
Now what happens when that central server gets the next Blaster?
Nothing, because it won't. There won't be a next Blaster because that server would either be behind a firewall or be patched months ahead of time like every other sane person was when the government warned them twice to.
Everyone is screwed. Nothing new, It's like hotmail, but they are going to pretend you have some input.
Guess what? You have the choice not to use Hotmail.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Every single user from power users on down to the almost computer illiterate that I have shown tabbed browsing to _love_ it.
What gets in the way is having multiple windows open on the desktop that one has to wade through.
Tabbed browsing revolutionizes web surfing because it allows people to more efficiently multi-task. For example-- search google, click on various links to open in new background tabs, and then peruse and compare, rather than open. go back etc, or wait for a new window.
I'd say it isn't implemented in windows because it gives people more options and allows them to do things in a way that isn't controlled by MS...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
it's the true office suite
Microsoft has named their new self-destructing-documents feature the /. effect and found that it works particularly well on .html files.
From the article: 76 percent profit margin
Even the oil companies don't have a markup this big.
Except most large school will sell you a copy of Microsoft Office Proffessional for about $20 on CDR. Student's are included in their site license. I went and got a new CD everytime MS released a new version when I was in school.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Maybe this will fix some of Microsoft's problems too? No more Halloween memos?
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/
Another press release
Fed investigator:"Nyuck nyuck, aks microsoft"
For some reason, I knew it was pronounced as "aks", but I never pictured thats how you'd spell it. It appears you're correct though. (fo shizzle)
Because MS gives a shit how many windows you have open?
Still, that's twenty bucks!! That buys you at *least* a 12-pack!
College priorities, people!! Softwre free, beer not free!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I'm not sure I understand what your saying. "Loose the data on the server"? Their going to attack it with data? Perhaps you could of used a different spelling?
Mandrake, the distro for people who really shoudn't be using Linux without supervision (read, "Your sysadmin installs it and gives you an unprivileged user account and locks the box down tight, if that's really possible on Mandrake, and he could tell you the root password but then he'd have to kill you and would enjoy doing it") but who nevertheless are going to rush headlong into it anyway.
The fact of the matter is that Linux is fundamentally a server operating system, as is the rest of the *nix family and the NT Server/W2K Server line. If you want to run a server OS, fine, but you have an ethical responsibility to educate yourself and become a knowledegable user. If you choose not to meet that responsiblity, Microsoft and Apple both have operating systems which are better suited to your talents, or lack thereof. Mandrake, sadly, pitches their usually badly done distro toward those who do not wish to educate themselves. The only difference between an ignorant Windows user and an ignorant Mandrake user is the OS, but they're still ignorant and that is the problem.
Debian unstable? I've been running it as my desktop OS for about a year and a half now, since I got tired of Red Hat's BlueCurve and had no interest in their one-year-to-EOL policy. I get the latest KDE (much faster than users of Mandrake Hooker, or Cooker, or whatever they call it) do, and despite the fact that they call this Debian *Unstable* it has always been far more stable and had fewer problems than the Mandrake release versions that my father uses.
So yes, if you want a decent OS you should use Debian Unstable. It's more stable than Mandrake releases tend to be, and it will force you to know what you are doing to a far greater degree than Mandrake will. That is a Good Thing.
So take that cap in your own arse, thank you very much. But then, you probably enjoy that sort of thing.
Oh, and did I mention Debian unstable is on 2.4.22 ? Being ignorant, you probably had no idea. Also, you might be interested to note that even now the 2.2 kernel is more stable than 2.4 and I know a number of people who have yet to migrate their most mission-critical systems to a 2.4 kernel. They run Debian Stable on them, they have rock-solid reliability and great uptime, and they are happy.
I've seen the new "improved" Outlook in action on TechTV and I don't get where all the accolades are coming from. The new interface is terrible. It's cluttered, overly complex, and too heavy on eye candy. As a consultant, I know that at least my clients want a clean interface. All they want on their current Outlook is the Outlook Bar and the message pane. They don't even want the Preview Pane. And now the screen is seperated into thirds with the way too big control panel thingy on the left, the message headers in the middle and the preview pane/read pane on the right? This is a step backward in my opinion.
Yeah but we only needed one CDR for me an all my friends... it think it worked out to less than a $1. Technically it was all still legal too.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
They always had self destructing files, they just moved it from the buglist to the featurelist!!!
Most users will never use more than about 10% of Word's features and most HATE word's "Here, you are doing X, let me help and screw it all up with auto formating" tools that are enabled by default.
Frankly, the lack of support for Mac users (not surprising) has me a little worried as a Mac user, however most of my clients are small mom & pop shops that use Quickbooks more than office.
I did not use MS office for the first 6 months I had this iBook, I used appleworks that was bundled with it just fine until I needed Powerpoint and Keynotes was another 6 months away. All the tools I really need in a word processor arrived in MS Works 2.0. Since then, most of the features frankly get in my way and that of others as well. Although, MS Office for Mac is my favorite version of Office. PowerPoint still runs better on my Mac with cooler features, like QT transitions, than on Windows.
Anyway, I look for MS to possibly strke out again in the "Its been 18 months, time for you businesses to pay us more money again for an "upgrade". Although I look for a new round of computer buying in the next year or two as I have seen more clients walking in the past few months with "Advise and Consult" request on what new PC's to purchase. If that's the case then Office 2003 may see a few more users than XP.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Is this a bad time to mention the fact that I still use WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and Lotus Freelance Graphics as my main productivity applications? Why? Because I like them. I always have (except that WordPerfect 5 and 6 for Windows had some stability issues, but the current releases are pretty good).
Yeah it was David Byrne v. Edward Tufte. Byrnbe supported ppt whereas Tufte was on the right side (as you would expect).
Self-destructing documents? Now?
Since when this is a new feature? Word 97 already destroys documents since long ago... and uncleanly, too!
In regards to the OneNote program, which I find very useful (I work IT in a law firm), we also circulate a lot of .pdf's.
Now, if someone (hint) would come up with a program to make scanned notes in .pdf format compatible with OneNote screens, and allow these converted notes to be searchable notes, sell the software (lets call it CashConverter) for $80 a pop, and BAM! you got yourself a small fortune.
MS-Powerpointviewer is broken, that is to say it runs only on MS-Windows. Also, since the file format changes every year, why throw away all that work. If you use MS-Powerpoint then your presentations will be unreadable. Use kpresenter or OO.o or even put up a good old web page. That last option allows you to give out the URL.
Softwre free, beer not free!
I understand Richard Stallman already made this sort of argument. I use the free software, but I haven't been able to find any free beer.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Everyone's moaning about how DRM will completely lock out everything but Office. If someone was so inclined, they can download the Windows Rights Management SDK, register their app as a DRM consumer, and open the Office 2k3's files like crazy.
You've got to email MS's Rights Management team to get a client certificate, and I'm not sure on the specifics on what's needed for that. Point is, third-party folks will be able to utilize the Windows DRM.
This was answered in my post about an interview with Bill.
Bill wondered if Phoenix, the BIOS company, still existed. Can any regular Slashdot reader have missed all the recent articles about the Mozilla variant named Phoenix being told by Phoenix the company to stop using their trademark?
Not only does Bill not read Slashdot, it is doubtful he has any clue what is happening in the computer world. That is why MS is always playing catch-up.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Geez, GroupWise has had that since at least 5.0, although admittedly the granularity is in one day increments. Makes me wonder if they OutLook has delayed sending yet (really handy for sending anniversary messages)...
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Anyway, see if it works for you. You can't play DirectX games with it, but it runs Office and just about anything else Windows (including Quicken and QuickTime) just fine. Around $90 for download license.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?