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

Self-destructing documents?

[maxmg]

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.

OpenOffice and LAMP

[mcrbids]

This "Authentication Server" that MS is pushing on the corporate suits sounds kind of neat... but why couldn't this be implemented in a few afternoons for OO using LAMP?

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:

1. Open Office needs to require credentials.
   
2. Open Office needs a saving filter.
   
3. A rudimentary certificate manager in Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP needs to be written.
   
4. ...???
   
5. Profit!!!!
   

Really - what's the big deal here?