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

OpenOffice

[Dreadlord]

Cool, know we know what we're going to see in the next version of OpenOffice.

Re:OpenOffice

[lgftsa]

*Real* men edit files by waving a magnet over the disk platters.

New?

[mabu]

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.

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.

A symptom of a greater problem.

[eidechse]

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?

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?

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

[IntelliTubbie]

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"

Uh, dude? Kirk Douglas was Spartacus. RTFIMDB.

Perhaps you were thinking of Ben-Hur?. Sure, they're similar, but anyone who gets similar things like these confused should NOT use vi. You might end up trying to save a file and accidentally blow up a small village.

Cheers,
IT

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.

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