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Monday, June 4, 2001		Software

The new Office eXPerience
Tribune News Service

THIS is the latest from the Microsoft stable. The new product, Microsoft Office XP, short for experience, that was launched in New Delhi last week is not just an upgraded version of MS Office but promises to be significantly different. And much better.

This suit consists of Word, Excel, Outlook, Power Point and Access and is marked with very tight integration between the five programs. With speech and handwriting recognition built in, a text-to-speech feature, as well as good crash recovery features, it has much to offer.

Microsoft’s Office suite has an estimated base of 4.5 million users in India, and according to Rajiv Kaul, Managing Director of Microsoft India, it has 90 per cent of the share of desktops worldwide.

Rajiv Kaul speaking at the Office XP launch in New Delhi on Thursday.

The system requirements for all versions of Office XP are Pentium III processor and 128 MB RAM. The new software is an upgraded version of Office 2000 launched by Microsoft in May 1999. It has new collaboration features such as Sharepoint team services and unified e-mail for improving the efficiency of virtual teams. (See box for more features).

Rajiv Kaul, and Karthik Padmanabhan, Senior Marketing Manager at Microsoft Corporation India launched the new product, at a presentation that highlighted the new software’s features with synchronised casualness. "Office XP is at the core of Microsoft’s .Net vision redefining the end-user computing experience. With this release, the company aims to give users the feature sets and functionalities of Office as per their requirement," Kaul says.

Bill Gates with the new software

To prevent casual copying of the product, activation has been made compulsory. It provides native support for XML and integrates Microsoft’s other products like MSN Messenger and Hotmail. The estimated retail price of the stand version is pegged at Rs 20,500.

This is for the first time that Microsoft has launched product-specific TV commercials revolving around the XP. "Office XP would immediately be available through Microsoft’s retail channel, licensing programmes and through original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)," Kaul says.

The product is available in four flavours — Office XP standard, Office XP professional, Office XP developer and Office XP small business edition.

10 cool features

1. Smart Tags: Microsoft Office Smart Tags are a set of buttons that are shared across the Office applications. These buttons appear when the user needs them and gives the user the options they need to change the given action or error.

2. Task Panes: Office XP applications give users easy access to their important tasks in a single integrated view. From the Task Pane, which appears on the right side of the screen, users can perform searches, open or start a new document, or even access translation and template services via the Web.

3. Speech: Office XP increases user productivity by supplementing traditional mouse and keyboard execution with voice commands. Users can dictate text, make direct formatting changes, and navigate menus using speech and voice command.

4. Handwriting: Office XP enables users to take handwritten notes on their handheld device and upload their notes as text directly into their Office applications. East Asian users will be able to handwrite characters in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and Word will automatically convert it to the correct typed character.

5. Save to MSN: Using MSN Communities, users can save their documents to a file cabinet on the Internet, which can be private or public.

6. Repair and Extract: Microsoft Word and Excel can automatically invoke this corrupt-document repair and recovery functionality in the event of an error or a failure to load a file.

7. Send for review: Office understands each user’s specific role in the review cycle and gives each user the tools needed to successfully collaborate on documents.

8. MSN Messenger Integration: When an Outlook user opens an e-mail message (or views it via the Preview Pane) or a contact card, he or she can identify whether that person is online.

9. Smart Tag Extensibility: In addition to the Smart Tags that will ship as part of Word and Excel, the third parties can tie in to the Smart Tag technology to offer their own solutions for Office XP.

10. Integration with SharePoint Team Services: Office XP is tightly integrated with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services, a rich easy-to-create Web site that will improve the way teams manage information and activities.