The new version of Microsoft Office, due out on 21 October,
will be a very different beast to its predecessors. The popular
Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications are still present but there
is plenty of new software aimed at making Office System 2003 "the
centre of businesses' development architectures", said
Microsoft.
For example, Infopath is a new tool for creating simple electronic
forms. Data typed into such forms is stored as XML. Another
addition is Onenote, a program that allows users to jot down notes
in a similar way to Stickies on the Apple Mac.
But the big change relates to software development. Office is being
positioned by Microsoft as a platform for workflow and
collaborative computing.
Ivo Salmre, product manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft, said,
"Sophisticated organisations will develop applications based on
smart documents in Office."
Users can customise Office 2000 and Office XP using Visual Basic
for Applications (VBA), a scripting engine built into Office.
Microsoft has now extended the development features in Office,
providing support for its .net web services architecture. Compared
to the limited functionality in VBA, .net gives an Office
programmer a far richer development environment.
Salmre said, "Developers can use Visual Studio and Microsoft Office
to build and deploy complete business applications." He said the
addition of the .net technology would allow IT departments to roll
out rich client applications developed on the Office system.
One company looking at how software could be developed around
Office is Digita, which has developed electronic forms for filling
in Inland Revenue tax forms. The software uses an Office-based form
running on an end-user's PC that validates the tax form. The
completed form is submitted via Digita's website to the government
gateway.
James Governor, principal analyst at Redmonk, said the main focus
of the new Office product is providing a way to reduce the amount
of paper-based processes still used by businesses. He said, "For
all the talk of e-business, it is amazing how much paper business
still exists. Microsoft wants to provide a mechanism for automating
business processes."
Governor said the new version of Office, although extremely
powerful, would require IT to take central control of Office to
avoid situations where the IT department is unaware of how Office
has been customised within business departments. "You could end up
with a situation where business-critical software based on Office
is run and managed by business departments rather than IT," he
said.
IT directors faced such a problem in 1999, as they battled to track
down all the non-Y2K-compliant code in their businesses. At the
time, it was common to run business-critical functions on
spreadsheets, some of which were not Y2K-compliant.
Governor warned that the flexibility in Office would put incredible
strain on IT departments that have to manage a stable IT
environment. "IT departments will need to take control of which
features in Office to roll out," he said.
He suggested that IT departments should consider thin client
technology such as Terminal Services within Windows 2000/2003 or
Citrix Metaframe, both of which could be used to centralise the
configuration of Office.