Office XP, the next version of Microsoft's application suite, will
be officially released on May 31, with new features to include
voice recognition and smart tags, writes Daniel Thomas
Microsoft said Office XP users will be able to open and close files
and perform other common tasks via voice command. In addition,
smart tags will more tightly integrate the suite with information
from the Web, enterprise data sources and other applications,
Microsoft said.
Microsoft called XP "the most significant version of Office ever
released".
But Meta Group programme director Ashim Pal said, "The radical
implementation will be the one after XP, when the user interface
will look more like a portal."
To enable Office users to work more closely together, Microsoft has
introduced Sharepoint Team Services, a set of intranet applications
that enable workgroups to build their own sites.
Other new features include the ability to cut, copy and paste
multiple data sets to the clipboard, a unified reminder window and
a document recovery feature, that will "guarantee" that no data is
lost in the event of a system crash.