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• October 29, 2003 •
On the 21st October Microsoft launched their new Office System, which includes six suites, 11 products, four servers, one service and Solution Accelerator.
I installed the Office Professional Edition 2003 on a Dell Latitude C640 laptop, Pentium 4-M 2.0 GHz, 512 MB RAM, running Windows XP Professional (SP1).
Since the focus of Windows-Help.NET is on Microsoft's operating systems, I'll just give a brief overview of this new Office release.
System Requirements
This new Office version will no longer install on Microsoft Windows 95, 98, 98SE, Me or NT 4. Personally I don't see much wrong with that, I wouldn't expect people running these "old" operating systems (Windows 95 is no longer supported by Microsoft, and Windows 98, 98SE, Me and NT 4 are quickly headed for extinction too) to install the "latest and greatest" Office version. Microsoft lists Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or Windows XP as minimum OS requirements. For a processor, Microsoft lists a Pentium III (or equivalent) running at 233 MHz as minimum, but recommends a Pentium IV. Memory requirements are listed as 128 MB or above, but to use the optional installation of Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager, you need 260 MB RAM or above.
Installation
Setup will offer you a choice of installation: Typical, Complete, Minimal or Custom (Figure). The installation itself took around 10 minutes, and - like Office XP - did not require a reboot. When the installation completes, you'll be presented with a last option, to Check the Web for updates and additional downloads, and to Delete installation files (Figure).
Activation
When you first use any of the office applications, you will be prompted to activate the installation (Figure). All Office 2003 Editions retail products contain software-based product activation technology, which means you need to activate your Office 2003 Editions products to use them. Product Activation works by verifying that a software program's product key, which you must use to install the product, has not been used on more computers than intended by the software's license. You have 50 grace launches before you must activate an Office 2003 Editions product. If you do not activate within 50 launches, the product will go into reduced-functionality mode. At this point, you will not be able to edit documents or create new ones. Existing documents can still be viewed and printed, because the actual files remain unchanged. When a program is in reduced functionality mode, you may still activate it at any time to enable its full functionality. For more information read: Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Product Activation Overview.
First Impression
Office 2003 has many similarities with Office XP in daily use. What will strike you most is that the Office 2003 colored interface now changes to match Windows XP's limited color schemes. Most users will see the (XP standard) Blue color scheme (Figure), but if you changed your XP's color scheme to Olive (Figure) or Silver (Figure), Office 2003 will follow suit. If you set Windows XP to use Windows Classic Style for windows and buttons, Office 2003 changes to match that too (Figure). A number of users actually seem to like this scheme most; it looks most like the "traditional" Office in that case. The "standard" Office 2003 interface looks... well, let's say... different. Toolbars, the tops of task panes and some other UI elements have a tubular look to them, which doesn't resemble the Windows XP look. But I think the UI is just something that needs some time to get used to.
Microsoft's goals for Office 2003
According to Microsoft, there are four major design goals for Office 2003: Security, Reliability, Mobility and Ease of Use. While on first impression there doesn't seem to be any major changes from Office XP, the changes are legion throughout the suite to implement the design goals stated above.
This time, Microsoft spend a great deal of time on making the individual products work better, and also improving on the way products share information between them, instead of adding even more features (which most people hardly use).
What's New?
One of the more obvious changes you will notice when looking at the toolbar of certain Office applications is the new Permissions button (Figure). When you press this button for the first time, it will prompt you to install Windows Rights Management (WRM) client software, a 345 KB download from the Microsoft site. Next you'll need to sign up on the WRM beta, and get a certificate for your computer. Once set-up, the Permissions button helps you configure settings for the current document (Figure), using a new technology called Information Rights Management (IRM).
Using IRM you can basically restrict how sensitive documents and email can be shared. For example, you might specify that the current document cannot be copied, forwarded, or edited, something quite useful as you finally get control over your documents even after they leave your computer. Business users will surely appreciate this feature which could reduce the "leaking" of internal documents and emails quite considerably. Sure, it's not 100% secure: a user with access could still take a screenshot (or literally a picture of the monitor), or just pick up a telephone and read a document from screen, but I'm sure many will agree that this is a significant step in the right direction.
Documents and emails are encrypted and access rights are stored on a WRM server. Since rights management is still in beta, Microsoft is supplying a public WRM server that testers can access. When the Right Management software will be released, enterprises will need to set up WRM services - on a server running Windows Server 2003 - to access this feature.
Additional support for Extensible Markup Language (XML) and information rights management (IRM) content creation and authoring available in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 only.
Office Word 2003
The biggest change in Word (besides the already mentioned interface) is the ability to create Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents (Figure). This makes it easier to create pre-formatted templates or documents, which can be completed by other users. More information on XML can be found on the XML Web site. Word's support for XML is complete: Every Word formatting option is available, and users can roundtrip Word documents from the application, to a Web service, and back again, without losing any of the formatting.
Office Excel 2003
Like Word, Excel also supports the creation of XML documents, but unlike Word, Excel's XML isn't as complete because some of Excel's functionality doesn't map very well to XML. Because of this, Excel's XML documents are not 100% roundtrippable.
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