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."

Comments

My new machine at work came with 2003 on it

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Re:My new machine at work came with 2003 on it

[Zeddicus_Z]

The real question is whether Outlook:

1. Parses the HTML, recognises the external image link and consequently does not send a request for the image, or
2. Parses the HTML, recognises the external image link, downloads the image and then just fails to display it until you click on the X.

May not seem like much of a difference, but it is. (1) still allows marketers/spammers to collect view statistics and gain some measure of response to their trash. while (2) does not. What's the bet O2k3 does the latter?

After all, if MS really cared about dangerous HTML content and the spam problem they'd have added a "parse all incoming emails as text only" option long ago.

Re:Silk?

[red floyd]

Fine. You are aware, though, that Microsoft provides a free Powerpoint Viewer? All you have to do is go to microsoft.com and download it.

ORIGINAL POST as submitted

[securitas]

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.

The first users of MS Office 2003 are weighing in and the response is decidedly 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. Microsoft probably heard this in beta trials and has adopted the curious strategy of denigrating previous versions of Office as "too hard to find things" and having a "clunky" interface. 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." E-mails will not self-destruct. Another problem is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management that will shut out Mac users (Google link). PC World has a long and detailed review of Microsoft Office 2003 (single-page).

Re:Office 2003 Reviews on Slashdot

[BrynM]

I wonder if Bill Gates reads Slash. I mean, think about it for a second, whould he not? Maybe ge eaven posts on /. under some bogus name like Clitylicker69 or somthing...

He could be any one of these folks for a start. Sadly, the only licker is an Orc-Licker though.

Outlook copies from Evolution?

[steveha]

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

Don't forget to upgrade OS as well...

[fruey]

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.)

They don't really delf-destruct...

[pointbeing]

I wonder how many people howling about Office 2003 have actually used it?

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.

That's NOT all

[Ripplet]

"Right now you can put 'confidential' on a document, but that's all."

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...

I went to launch event yesterday...

[weave]

Here's my impressions and comments based on what I've read here...

• The opening keynote presentation couldn't be more boring. Two hours of powerpoint slides. And the transitions were a bit jerky. They should have used Apple's Keynote for their keynote. The followup sessions were much better (I attended the deployment track)
• You can't print screen, copy, whatever, a protected document that an author sets to disallow that. But you can get a print screen if you run the OS under Virtual PC or VMWARE. (asked and answered at the event).
• Someone or people defined on each RMS (Stallman must be upset) server can override the security as a fail safe. I assume this also means expired docs. You're email isn't safe from subpoenas after all.
• I personally like the idea of expiring emails. It will allow me to talk shit about my bosses a lot easier with little fear that my message will be forwarded by someone and end up in their INBOX. We currently PGP "sensitive" emails like that, but that doesn't prevent someone from decrypting and sending on.
• An RMS server requires active directory, each AD user account to have an email account listed in the directory, and MS SQL server. It does *NOT* require Exchange.
• After 8 hours of presentations, I still don't know the difference between Sharepoint Windows Services and Sharepoint Portal Services.
• A lot of this stuff looks really impressive. It's obvious a lot of R&D and coding time went into this stuff. I can see a lot of benefit to huge organizations, but small-to-medium size businesses should be fine with older copies of Office or Open Office.
• I don't see how the open source model could ever catch up with the collective work of the "Office System." Who else has the resources? And I'm no Microsoft flunky (read my posting history)
• Lots of features are tied to required elements on the server end (hence it being called the Office "System"). If you try to use one of those features which isn't supported on the back-end, the user will get a little error about contacting IT to enable the feature. Wonderful, I can imagine the wasted support calls saying "No, not unless someone gives me $10,000+ can you do that."
• They made extensive use of Virtual PC to simulate client interaction but more interesting was Virtual Server. The latter controlled through a web interface. I got the felling that Virtual PC might not run server, but then again, it might be like vmware, with a bogus one gig size limit for virtual machines to force you to get ESX or GSX.
• There was some company saying how much they saved because they have 12,000 users in Exchange and were able to reduce the number of servers that that requires from something like 14 to 8. (rough memory there, amount may be incorrect, but the scale is about right). That was shocking. I run a mail server with 27,000 users on a 4 gig RAM dual processor xeon box under Linux. (Granted, it doesn't do all that exchange does, but damn)
• They announced early on that they were giving vouchers away for a free retail copy of Office Professsional and OneNote to all attendees if you stayed to the end. Good idea, it worked. Place was still packed at the end. But on the way out, I was handed a t-shirt cube (one of those compressed brick packaging things). Half way out I said to my co-worker, "I guess the voucher is inside, but I want to check" We opened it up and there was nothing. Ran back to one of the people with the t-shirt boxes and said we didn't get a voucher. They said "Oh, ok" and handed us a piece of paper. If I got home and realized I didn't have it, I would have been pissed as hell. I bet a lot of other people were stiffed out of their vouchers. I wonder if the people handing out the stuff to people exiting were pocketing the vouchers. I bet you could make a good chunk of coin reselling that stuff. Or maybe it was some conspiracy where they were told to forget to hand them out unless specifically asked to reduce the number of free copies to be given out. Or p

Re:Spartacus. Vi or Emacs user????

[Anonymous Coward]

Kirk Douglas was Spartacus. But Charlton Heston is president of the NRA, his tagline is "From my dead cold hands" while holding up a shotgun (or some other gun).

Not that I support him, but FYI. :)

Re:Interpreting this FUD

[WNight]

Actually in Win95 and Win98 you not only had to reboot when changing your IP address (but not when DHCP got a new address, go figure) but simply going into the network control panel and pressing 'OK', with or without any changes, would ask for the CD and reload files. (Pressing cancel in the network settings, or just refusing to give it the CD did work.) I've worked in IT and tech support for years, this absolutely did happen.

Microsoft also makes it hard to download redistributable patches and upgrades. Not impossible, but all hidden in different places. For service packs you can search for redist and get the link, for Direct X it's in an inconvenient place on the page, under something about developers I think, and for IE, it's an easily missed check-box in the download stub which will tell it to download the full pack, instead of just what you need. Not impossible, and none of them are technically hidden, but pretty much as difficult as they could make it.

Microsoft isn't "controlling" mine or anybody else's deskop.

If you've missed all of MS's attempts to control not only their OS but everyone's applications, you've been sleeping since the late 80s. Their DRM is intrusive, their proposed DRM (Palladium) is worse, and they lie about the effectiveness of it. Yes, actual lies. Bill himself has been quoted as saying it'll stop viruses and worms, but this is untrue. Only executing signed code won't prevent buffer overflows in Outlook or IE, or either of them from simply letting scripts do more than they should.

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.

If you blindly install MS's patches, you're a fool. They've very frequently broken third-party applications since the dos days ("Dos ain't done 'till Lotus don't run") and they continue to do so. Hell, they even break MS's own software every now and then. There's the Office bug that caused it to ask for your key over and over, for which MS proposed rolling the system date back by a year. There was the recent XP slowdown which caused many computers to take up to five minutes to boot and caused similar delays when you tried to do anything.

MS patches need intensive testing, especially in a large corporation, before they can be used on a production machine.

While the previous poster did hate MS (M$, etc) it wasn't entirely groundless. They have broken the law, lied in court, created upgrades that have intentionally sabotaged third-party applications, created what ammounts to spyware in the OS, and lied to the user about all of it. Not trustworthy at all.