Microsoft's Office bucks for a promotion

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The top reason companies move workers is because their machines are running copies of Office that are several versions old and it's just time. The No. 2 reason, Silver said, is that companies have already paid for Office 2003 through a volume license and want to get their money's worth.

Still, Silver said, many companies are using Office 2003 in their business processes, even if that was not a major factor in the decision to upgrade.

Show and tell
This week's conference is an effort to help create more enticing options for companies. Earlier in the week, Salesforce.com announced an initiative to get Office developers to write applications that tap into data stored in Salesforce.com's hosted sales applications.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has followed its own advice, with Project Elixir, an internal effort that uses Outlook as a front end for customer-relationship information from Microsoft's Siebel Systems database. Microsoft is in the process of trying to take what it did and transform it into a broader set of tools that others can use to turn Outlook into a gateway for many different types of enterprise software.

There are tons of examples of ways that data can move in and out of Office, says Microsoft's McAniff. He points to the North Carolina Highway Patrol, which is using Office's InfoPath component to replace some 500 forms that officers had been filling out in various ways, including by hand. Not only is the form-filling process electronic, he said, but the information can automatically be grabbed by the agency's back-end software.

"I think the product (Office 2003) is really starting to pull this together," he said. "You start to look at this and say 'Aha, there is tremendous opportunity.'"

It's hard to tell how successful Microsoft has been. Clearly, many companies use Office 2003 in the same way they have used prior versions--for word processing and spreadsheets.

DeGroot said he thinks it will be slow going. "It's partly a business inertia issue," he said. "Are businesses going to automate their processes at the same speed as they adopted Office itself? I think the answer is no."

Even if Microsoft is relatively successful, DeGroot said it may not show up in the Office sales numbers, since most businesses already use Office. Rather, he said, companies that rely on Office for a broader role may find themselves buying more things like Exchange, Project and SharePoint services.

"The success of the Office System strategy will be reflected largely in the sale of server software," DeGroot said.

[tcmug]

Give us the tools

While I like the idea of MS Office becoming a development platform (I've been developing in Access and with the Outlook Object Model for years), I think MS has a way to go in giving us the tools to be sucessful.

Office is still using the JET database engine, and the version VBA included with office is still based on Visual Basic 6 (released in 1998). Moreover, documentation on items such as the outlook object model is limited and often very difficult to find.

So I say give us the "tools"! Integrate MSDE (SQL Server), and please, please update VBA to included VB.NET.

Just my two cents

Tim
Boston, MA

[Earl Benser]

I need the tools...

I need a clean, unencumbered word processor which can
generate the basic documents I need. I want a clean spreadsheet
which can track data for me. I need a basic data base to link
resources. I DON'T need some bloated ou,t on-steroids, Office
'system' no matter how 'nice' Bill claims it will be.

The KISS principle is still the way to go, Focus the application
designs on their core jobs. Then, as needed, develop supporting
applications to go into other activities.

Integration is the route of fools. That's like trying to come up
with one golf club good for any shot on the course.

The revision trap

A trap I've seen people fall into is developing applications in Access only to find out that the application requires a significant amount of recoding with each Access upgrade. This isn't worth the time and effort in my opinion. I've stuck to developing web based, platform independent apps only , as they seem to have a much longer life span with much less maintenance.