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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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Cool, know we know what we're going to see in the next version of OpenOffice.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
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.
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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"
--
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
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?
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.
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.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
...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.
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
Why isn't there a penguin assistant for OO? I make fun of the stupid paperclip in MS Office but at least they let you change it. When I had to use Windows 98 with Office 2000 I actually kind of liked having the little cat run around purring, and on the Mac I liked the dog, panting and smiling, I could imagine he was cheering me on as I typed, getting excited at my more insightful moments of composition...
at least for a week or so anyway. Then I turned the damn thing off.
I had a lecturer at uni whose entire course was in powerpoint.
not coincidentally, it was the worse course I've ever had.
since taking decent notes was impossible, the only thing to do was download the presentations (43MB for a bit of text and pictures!) and print them off, 2 slides per page.
worst... technology... ever!
Like they need to add "self destructing documents" to Word. One bad software crash, bingo, any document you were working on is destroyed.:)
So now, losing your work in a crash is not a bug, it's a feature.
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
"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.
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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
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
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
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...
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.