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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
Very much so. I'm a consultant and have actually spent quite a lot of time lately telling customers why their centralized Exchange deployments with Outlook 2000 suck *ss - it's the client, stupid!
Outlook 2000 massively blows, Outlook XP is a bit better but pops up annoying dialogs when the network gets slow, and Outlook 2003 finally has it right - it's the old "third time's a charm" cycle from MS rearing its ugly head again.
Outlook 2003 introduces a new semi-connected mode called "Cached mode" that caches messages locally and works great. It also supports (in conjunction with Exchange 2003 only, there's the rub!) a new remote transport, RPC over HTTP, that is frankly pretty amazingly cool and lets me run the full client remotely with no VPN, no hangs, and decent feedback as to what's going on. What a concept!
I'm sounding like a cheerleader here, and I'm not, but I do have to say that Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 are pretty much perfect poster children for the "third time's a charm" syndrome from Microsoft. They've finally gotten some of the problems through their thick skulls and, if not outright fixed them, at least started nicely down that road.
...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.
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.
Yes, it's multi-threaded. There are some scenarios that you _could_ get a hangup on the main thread, but they're very uncommon.
Another posted pointed out cached-exchange. It works great, and you can read all your email without even being connected.
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
Or the day the clock on time.windows.com ntp service dies and millions of word documents disappear.
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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.
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 think the general idea is to control who can see the document. And the implementation requires that your run the digital restrictions management server (Windows Server 2003).
So instead of shred(1), the equivalent free software solution is to set up a *NIX server and keep the documents on that. Set up a remote graphics protocol (X11 or VNC) so that workers can log in to look at the documents under control. Don't set up any kind of network file system; keep those files bottled up. Use *NIX security to control which users can read which files, and which users can edit which files (using tools on the server, of course).
You could even set up some sort of groupware to run purely on the server; email, or maybe even a one-computer USENET!
This won't control emails sent outside the company, but then, nothing really will.
The best part is that the free software solution will cost so much less than Windows Sever 2003 plus all the client licenses. It'll run on much cheaper hardware, too.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
I was writing my final thesis with MS Word. At home I used Word 97, at work I used Word 2000. Suddenly I noticed that I could not edit the document at home anymore. If I tried to open it, it would compain that "The document has embedded fonts in it and can't be edited" (or something along those lines). I could read it, but not edit it. At work, it still worked.
Frustrated, I installed OpenOffice 1.1 and tried to open the file. It worked perfectly! Not a single problem! I made some changes to the document and saved it under a new name. Imagine my surprise when I noticed the filesize of the new document: About 65KB! the exact same document saved by MS Word was over 600KB in size! The settings and layout were identical on both, the OO-version had few changes here and there (nothing major, mostly corrected typos and the like), and they difference in filesize was about 1:10!
After that, I can safely say that MS Office is terrible!
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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
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.
I'm not talking about that. I'm saying what if Microsoft DRM protects all documents when you save them? It could still attach permissions saying that anyone could decrypt the document, so users would never notice, but if you don't have the decryption mechanism (ie. you don't have Office), you won't be able to read the file. If you try to break the encryption, for purposes of interoperability, they can get you under the DMCA for bypassing a content protection mechanism.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.