Outlook Leads Office Suite Improvements

The upcoming release of the Office 2003 suite delivers better support for remote and mobile e-mail in the Outlook client, and makes improvements for document authoring in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Even though this release focuses mainly on collaboration and development of applications that use XML, organizations that aren’t ready to invest in these technologies might still want the suite’s e-mail and other improvements.

This article explains the new features of Office’s most widely used applications—Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—that do not require new servers or XML data sources and that work in all editions of the applications.

Beyond the Desktop to Collaboration, Development

Office 2003 continues Microsoft’s efforts to expand Office beyond document editing and e-mail into two new areas: collaboration and software development. The company hopes to expand the Office market and move the goalposts for open-source competitors by exploiting its unique ability to deliver an integrated line of products in these areas. (See the sidebar “Jeff Raikes on the Office Business Strategy“.)