Office XP Offers Collaboration, Discoverability

The release of Office XP makes Microsoft’s benchmark Office suite easier to use than ever before and introduces powerful collaboration features that are tightly integrated with Microsoft server applications. Another remarkable achievement is that the product shipped on time. But whether it is compelling enough to prompt wide-scale upgrades among the Office faithful is another story: to meet its tight development schedule, Microsoft removed some of the more attractive reasons to upgrade.

One of the most significant features is what hasn’t changed: file formats used by Word documents are consistent with those of Office 97 and Office 2000, sparing organizations the major nuisance of reconciling incompatible documents during the transition to a new version of Office.

Major Feature Changes

The main new features in Office XP are interface changes that give new users faster access to Office functions; substantial advances in the document review process; a turnkey intranet site (which can be installed on Windows 2000 Server) for sharing Office documents, personal and team schedules, discussions, and announcements; and administrative tools that improve deployment.