Microsoft Office 2000 Empowered With the World Wide Web

A White Paper on the Future Business Focus of Microsoft’s New Office Automation Suite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written By:      Michael Young

Senior Technical Consultant

DMR Consulting Ltd. (Ireland)

     

 

 

Table of Contents

Table of Contents   2

Introduction   3

Section 1 Microsoft Office 2000 in General 4

Relevant New Features   5

Individual Application Enhancements   7

Section 2 The World Wide Web and Beyond   16

Section 3 Synopsis   20

Introduction

Microsoft Office 2000 exemplifies the prevalent trends that have dominated the development of office automation applications.  To be more specific, the introduction of the ultimate web enabled environment.  With Office 2000, Intranet, Internet, and Extranet collaboration and development are now integrated seamlessly into a user’s environment.  This paper aims to provide an insight into the possible deployment tactics for Office 2000 and to discuss the relevant new features. 

The first section of this document relates the specific relevant features and enhancements found in Microsoft Office 2000.  It discusses the individual changes to primary applications and the new arrivals within the suite.  Section two presents a hypothetical case study.  This will focus on Microsoft Office 2000 as used for Internet, Intranet, and Extranet collaboration.  Section three presents a synopsis of where I think Microsoft is headed with Office 2000.  The good and bad, areas for improvements and the general “nice to haves” that may be available in a future release are all summarized in section three.

This document is a result of test usage of the product in BETA form and its final commercial release.  In other words, one geek in a lab testing for two weeks a very large and complex application suite to test and report on.

Section 1 Microsoft Office 2000 in General

The biggest new feature of Office 2000 is its complete web functionality and integration.  Microsoft Office 2000 now comes in four (4) guises, Standard, Small Business, Professional, and Premium.  The original core applications are still with us in standard, (i.e. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, and Outlook); however the focus on the web extends the Office suite by adding three applications to the Office environment, FrontPage, Publisher, and PhotoDraw.  The four packages for Office 2000 and their configuration are as indicated in the chart below:

 

In addition to the Office Suite, Microsoft has produced the Microsoft Office 2000 Resource Kit and the Microsoft Office 2000 Developer Suite.  These products are provided to extend the functionality of Office into the enterprise network, allowing for large distributed applications and workflow processing.  Each application through server extensions can integrate with the Microsoft Back Office environment.  Microsoft Access 2000 has further development tools that allow for communication with many of the standard relational database systems based on the “Structured Query Language (SQL) relational database management system (RDBMS) application programming environment.  Specific enhancements to each application are discussed later in this document. 

Relevant New Features

The Office Suite

Office 2000 employs a multitude of enhancements and new features.  These enhancements are generally made in the individual applications, however the sum of the components makes for a significant and important improvement to the overall product.  There are three key objectives for Microsoft Office 2000.

   Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

   Increase the Integration with the Internet.

   Simplify the user environment.

The first area, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is addressed in the area of deployment, administration and maintenance.  The customisation aspects of the product improve the installation and deployment of Office 2000.  Office uses a “Profile” Wizard designed to capture user settings and preferences.  These settings can be archived and restored by an administrator to protect the user environment, deployed to new machines across a network and distributed to existing workstations for roaming users.

The Custom Installation Wizard replaces the Network Installation functions of Office 97 and 95.  This allows the administrator to create custom installations on an individual, departmental, or even corporate enterprise, level.  Installation states can be defined such as “Install Now”, “Install-on-Demand”, “Run From Server”, or “Don’t Install” on a feature-by-feature basis.  Microsoft Office uses the new Windowsâ Installer technology developed to keep track of the installation state and to act as a middleman for key program components. 

Another new feature of Office 2000 is the Automated Recovery feature.  This keeps track of key applications files and attempt to repair damaged installation of Office.  In a distributed environment the repair files can be on an application server and distributed automatically across the network.

With Windows NT Domains, the roaming profile is used to keep track of Office configurations in conjunction with the Intelligent Install agents.  This is also part of the functionality for Terminal Servers and Net-PCs, which access terminal servers.

New features of Office are aimed directly at minimizing end-user downtime and reduce help desk costs.  The key here is the Self-Repairing application.  Essentially, all files and registry settings are checked at start-up and re-installed if found to be missing or corrupt.  Another health-check process can also be initiated manually through the help menu for non-critical files such as fonts and templates.  A customisable alert function can be set up to notify administrators and generate events dialogs unique to their organization.

Compatibility with previous versions of Office was also considered.  Office 2000 applications, with the exception of Access, are backward compatible to Office 97.  However, some features available in Office 2000 are not available in Office 97 and will not be recognised by the older suite.  Access 2000 has been re-engineered to use Unicode, as was the case with the other Office applications in earlier versions.  This enables Access to fit seamlessly into the office environment, sharing COM and DCOM objects and dynamic link libraries, which provide a more uniform user interface to the Office 2000 experience.  Database systems developed with prior versions of Microsoft Access are subject to the upgrade process and translation experience of past I.T. upgrades as was the case from Access 95 to 97 versions

 

 

Individual Application Enhancements

Word

Click-n-Type - Within Microsoft Word 2000, users can move the cursor anywhere on a page, click, and start typing. Users no longer have to begin typing in the upper-left corner, making it easier to lay out a document in any desired fashion.

Print Zoom - Microsoft Word 2000 lets users scale pages of documents at print time. This is useful for multinational companies that use different paper sizes. It also lets users print more than one document page on a piece of paper, which can be extremely beneficial for reviewing long documents.

Excel

See Through Selection - Microsoft Excel 2000 adds new cursors, including one that enables users to see what they are highlighting.

List AutoFill - If a user adds data to the bottom of a list, Excel 2000 will automatically extends the formatting and formulas of the list. In previous versions, these adjustments had to be made manually.

Improved Charting - Charting improvements in Excel 2000 include several new chart types (such as step charts and 3-D combination charts), improved formatting (data labels, multilevel category axis and time-scale labeling, and user-definable value axis units), and PivotChart (PivotTable functionality extended to charts). Users now have more ways to visually represent their data.

PowerPoint

Tri-Pane View - PowerPoint 2000 combines slides, outlines, and notes into one view. This makes it easy to perform many actions, including adding new slides, editing text, entering notes while creating a presentation, and navigating while editing.

AutoFit - In Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, text is automatically resized to fit into a placeholder so that it doesn't “fall off” the slide. AutoFit changes the line spacing, and then the font size-and then both to make the text fit, preventing users from having to make such changes manually.

Laptop Integration - PowerPoint 2000 disables Windows screensavers and the laptop's low-power screen mode during presentations, preventing unexpected interruptions.

Presentation Assistant - Integrating Style Checker, AutoClipArt, and other features, the Presentation Advisor is an Office Assistant feature that helps in the creation, publishing, and delivery of presentations.

Native Tables - PowerPoint 2000 can create tables without using Word or Excel in place. PowerPoint tables are composed of Office Art shapes and behave like tables in Word, making them easy to edit and consistent with styles and themes.

Graphic and AutoNumber Bullets - Any graphic can be used as a bullet in PowerPoint 2000, and numbered bullets will automatically adjust their order in a logical sequence.

Synchronized Voice Narration - Recorded narration is synchronized with the original presentation, including all transitions and build animations. PowerPoint 2000 also adds the ability to re-record narration for a single slide.

Access

Native SQL Server Connectivity - With Access 2000 and SQL Server, users can create a new SQL Server database or directly open and manipulate an existing SQL database, even performing such administrative tasks as replication, backup, and restoration. Access 2000 forms and reports can thus be used against SQL data.

Subdatasheets - A new hierarchical view displays multiple tables, making it easier to discern one-to-many relationships.

“Ready to Work.” When a new database is selected, Access 2000 presents a Table in Datasheet view so that a user can simply start typing data.

Name AutoCorrect - Access 2000 propagates name changes to fields of objects throughout the database, rather than forcing users to individually update those fields.

Control Grouping - Controls can be manipulated as a single unit.

Conditional Formatting - The value of the data in an Access 2000 database can determine the appearance of the data in a form.

Consistent User Interface - Access 2000 has undergone a facelift in the database window to improve usability and consistency with other Office applications. It also includes an Outlook-like bar.

AutoCompact - Access 2000 automatically compresses a database when the file is closed if the reduction in disk space is significant. Access databases are thus kept as small as possible, preventing wasted space on a user's hard-drive and making e-mail delivery of databases more efficient.

Outlook and E-mail Integration

Microsoft Office E-mail - All Office 2000 applications integrate e-mail into their core functionality. Users can directly send any type of Office 2000 document as a message from within the application rather than as an attached file. All applications include a mail header toolbar to make this easy to accomplish. A totally different architectural approach provides a vast improvement from previous versions of WordMail.

Outlook Today view - Combining e-mail messages, scheduled meetings, task lists, and a field to specify a contact search string, the Outlook Today view provides a snapshot of the essentials on a single screen.

Preview Pane - In Outlook 2000, a preview window appears in the Inbox, allowing users to quickly view e-mail messages without opening the message. The Auto Preview view is now available for Calendar entries as well as e-mail messages.

HTML Mail - Outlook 2000 fully supports sending and receiving e-mail in HTML. Users can edit fonts, HTML styles, and hyperlinks in WYSIWYG mode. HTML Mail can be anything from simple formatted text to a complete Web page-including images-and can be viewed offline, if desired. In addition, Outlook 2000 manages multiple signatures for different occasions or different recipients in HTML, Rich Text Format (RTF), or plain text. Similarly, Outlook 2000 supports different HTML stationery with different fonts and backgrounds and provides the ability to set default and per-message stationary.

Find and Organize Tools - Finding messages, appointments, or tasks is made easier in Outlook 2000 by a Web-style search tool. The Organize Tool provides quick and intuitive access to Outlook folders, views, and filters features. The Organize Tool's Conditional Formatting tab guides the user through the process of creating rules to highlight messages so that, for example, messages sent directly appear in green while those on which they are copied appear in blue.

Common task improvements - Performance is significantly enhanced for such tasks as startup, shutdown, switching between modules, and lookup of free/busy information. Users can continue to work while mail is being downloaded or while folders are being archived “in the background.”

Connections - Outlook can be set to periodically dial up and retrieve new messages. The Outlook AutoDetect Connection feature will disconnect gracefully if a user disconnects from an Internet Service Provider.

AutoSave - Outlook automatically saves unsent notes in a Drafts folder. The Drafts folder itself helps reduce Inbox clutter.

Multiple account management - Users can maintain multiple POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts, as well as LDAP directory accounts, with all mail coming into the same mailbox. Filters on Account Received From and Send From Account commands make it easy to keep accounts straight.

 

The following applications are the latest addition to the Microsoft Office Family of Products.

Microsoft PhotoDraw Business Graphics Software

 

Communication is becoming more and more graphics-driven due to the growth in imaging and the Web, where communications occur in a matter of seconds and graphics are required to hold a reader’s attention. Current programs are designed primarily for graphics design professionals. However, unlike existing programs, Microsoft PhotoDrawÔ business graphics software--the latest addition to the Microsoft Office Family of Products--is designed for business users. These users want to add custom-looking graphics to their marketing materials and Web pages but do not want to pay for a professional designer or to have to use professional tools themselves. PhotoDraw also combines multiple graphics programs in one by providing photo editing, vector drawing and illustration, and 3D in one easy-to-use program. This helps Microsoft Office users create custom-looking graphics to use in PowerPoint, Word, Publisher, and on the Web. It is easy because users start with standard clipart and photos and automatically customize them, and it works like Office. Here is a brief listing of some of the functionality available in Microsoft PhotoDraw.

All-in-One Photo-editing and Illustration

  Work seamlessly with different types of graphics. There is no need to learn different programs, or to switch between them.

  Customize Clipart - Customize standard clipart with different special effects to create a unique, customized look. For example, take a simple shape and make it look hand painted or hand drawn.

  Powerful Photo Touchup - Automatically fix red eye, remove dust and scratches, and correct brightness, contrast and color. The cloning tool allows you to remove unsightly objects from a photo.

  Painting, Drawing and Autoshapes - Paint uses natural brush strokes, including unique photo strokes. Draw and edit vector graphics. Assemble graphics quickly using 198 Autoshapes.

  3-D Effects - Apply 3-D effects to graphic elements with a single mouse click. Click to change the angle. You also control the lighting.

  Web Graphics - Create small, fast graphics for the Web. PhotoDraw automatically converts your image to a Web color palette and format. A wizard lets you preview various image qualities with download times to help you make good decisions for your Web site. Templates for navigation buttons, Web banners and watermarks get you started.

  Special Effects - 200 built-in special effects can be applied to text, clip art, photos and other graphics.

  Intelligent Print Capability - Intelligent printing automatically sizes and fits your graphic to a wide range of paper sizes, maintaining the correct aspect ratio and determining the highest print quality available from your printer.

  Advanced Support for Digital Cameras and Scanners

Ease of Use

  Visual Menus - Visual menus help the user navigate quickly through the program and discover features without having to memorize terminology.

  Visual Previews - Visual previews let users sample different special effects and apply them from a gallery of preset options.

  Smart Tools - Smart image correction tools save you steps by automating difficult photo editing tasks such as color correction.

  Multiple Level Undo - PhotoDraw supports multiple undo and redo.

  Business Templates and Content - More than 300 professionally designed business templates ensure that users can achieve great-looking custom graphics every time. Additionally, 20,000 high quality photos, backgrounds and clipart are included to help you get started.

 

Microsoft FrontPage and Creating and Managing a Web Site

 

FrontPage 2000 makes it possible for anyone to create rich, great-looking Web sites. This release of FrontPage includes many new features that let users create exactly the Web sites they want, make updating their sites easy, and work together with Microsoft Office. Some new features include:

  Tools for Creating Great-Looking Web sites. Users have more flexibility and control over how their pages look with Pixel Perfect Positioning and Layering, Cross-Browser DHTML Animation Effects, and Color Tools Everywhere.

  Custom Themes. FrontPage 2000 includes 60 pre-designed business-ready themes, and users can even customize these themes with the colors, logos, graphics, backgrounds, and bullets they want.

  Better-Than-Notepad HTML Editing. 100% source preservation means that users can edit HTML and scripts (including ASP) without FrontPage modifying their code. They can insert code directly in HTML View, and format their code exactly the way they want to.

  Easy Database Integration. Users can easily incorporate database query results into FrontPage-based Web pages, and that data can even be updated when the user enters the page or refreshes it.

  Supports the Latest Web Technology and Programmability. Users can create and edit HTML, DHTML, script, XML, and VML from within FrontPage. They can also add use the pre-built Web components that FrontPage ships with, use third-party add-ons, or use its programmability features to create add-ons of their own.

  Site-at-a-Glance Management Reports and Views. FrontPage 2000 uses a toolbar similar to a Microsoft Outlook toolbar to help users quickly get to the key areas in FrontPage that used to be located in two different programs—the FrontPage Explorer and the FrontPage Editor.

  Flexible Publishing Features. FrontPage 2000 gives users page-level control over publishing and more feedback during publishing, and allows them to use built-in FTP to easily publish to servers with or without the FrontPage Server Extensions installed.

  Flexible Collaboration Features. Office users can save documents directly to FrontPage-based Webs, use Page-Level Check In/Check Out to keep others from editing pages while they work on them, and use Workflow Reports to assign Web elements to specific team members. And Nested Subwebs allow a team to control their own sub-sites.

  Automate Routine Tasks. The FrontPage Auto Link Component automatically creates hyperlinks to all of the pages in a specific category. Users can rename or move a Web element or Office document, and hyperlinks are automatically fixed.

  Work Anywhere Features. Users can pre-select which environments to target (browser, server, FrontPage Server Extensions, ASP, DHTML, CSS, Java or script), and FrontPage automatically restricts features that won’t work on the targeted systems. FrontPage also uses the same management console as Windows NT Server, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) technology, and other BackOffice components.

  Works Great with Office. Office and FrontPage share common themes, toolbars, menus, shortcuts, and tools like the Format Painter, HTML Help, and background spell checking. Office users can save Office documents in HTML format and re-open them later in FrontPage or Office to make edits, without losing any important Office data.

Worldwide Use - FrontPage 2000 ships in 12 languages, uses a single worldwide executable, a global user interface, and allows users to have the FrontPage user interface in one language, but create content in other languages.

Easy to Get Up and Running - Uses the same installation process as Office, so companies can easily roll out FrontPage 2000 at the same time they roll out Office 2000. It’s also easier to install because a Personal Web Server is no longer required on each client.

Microsoft Publisher and Desktop Publishing

 

Microsoft Publisher is a business desktop publishing program that enables users to easily create professional-looking marketing materials. This release of Publisher offers more design options with over 2,000 professionally designed publication templates and hundreds of design elements for users to mix and match within their publications. A flexible wizard model allows users to make changes to publications quickly, and automated design expertise helps them achieve professional results – without design expertise.  Publisher 2000 also offers stronger Microsoft Office integration, so Microsoft Word users can work in a familiar environment while gaining the power of a full-featured desktop publishing program to create design-intensive publications such as newsletters, brochures, flyers, and Web sites.

A complete print to Web publishing solution, including full support for both desktop and commercial printing, as well as easy Web site design for creating simple Web sites, provides users with a complete printing and publishing solution.

Professional Design Expertise

  Design Sets - Over 40 sets of professionally designed looks that can be applied across all your publication needs from letterhead to brochure to Web site.

  Quick Publication Wizard - Provides professional looks and layout options for quick and easy publications that users can create in a matter of minutes.

  Catalog Wizard - Helps users set up well-designed multi-page catalogs or booklets.

  Flip graphics - Allows a user to flip any graphical element.

  Web Site Wizard - Guides a user step-by-step through set up of a multi-page Web site.

  AutoConvert - Allows you to re-purpose your content. AutoConvert Automatically changes your publication to a new size, layout or publication type with a click of a button. Add a mailing panel or tear-off coupons, or convert a newsletter or brochure to a Web site or vice versa. Publisher intelligently rearranges all the elements so they look their best in the new layout.

  Catalog - An easy to browse starting point for over 2200 professionally designed publications.

Easy to Learn and Use

  Office integration. Includes the Office Assistant, Background Spelling and Spell It, AutoFit Text, Multilevel Undo, shared dictionary, Personal Menus, the Office File Open dialog, and Detect and Repair – just like all the Office applications.

  Automatic bullets and numbers - Automatically applies bullets and numbers to lists, in exactly the same way as Microsoft Word.

  Mail Merge - Allows easy mail merge within a user’s publications with Word, Outlook, Access, Excel, Works and other common address books.

  Personal Profile - Builds a Personal Profile for a user while he/she works. Is automatically applied to future publications, to remove the time consuming process of adding a user’s name, address, phone, and logo information to each new publication. Allows for multiple profiles to be stored and used at any time.

  Page Navigation - Visual page navigation makes it easier for users to work within their publications.

  High Quality Content - Includes 10,000 clipart items, 1,500 photos, 200 fonts and 425 Design Gallery Objects.

  Color Schemes & Custom Color Schemes - Includes over 60 professionally coordinated Color Schemes that look good together. Can be applied to any publication. Completely customizable, so you can create and save your own look.

  Advanced Editing Toolbar - Provides advanced text editing functionality, such as shrinking, growing and rotation, for users who want more control over their text.

Complete Publishing Solution

  Pack and Go Wizard - Convenient Wizard packs users’ publications across multiple disks for efficient travel to a local copy shop or commercial printer.

  Automatic 4-Color separations - Gives users the flexibility to print their publications in full 4-color process for printing at a commercial printer. Great for larger print runs, and publications that include color photographs.

  Pantone Color Model Support - A standard ink matching system that allows users and printers to designate a specific printing color to match during printing

  Spot color - Provides users with the option of more cost-effective commercial printing, by creating or converting their publications to 1, 2 or 3 colors.

  Smart Re-coloring - Smartly helps users recolor clip art and graphics.

Other sources for information and other white papers on the technical aspects of Microsoft Office can be found on the Microsoft Web site as the listed locations below.

  http://www.microsoft.com/office/details.htm

  http://www.microsoft.com/office/enterprise/default.htm

  http://www.microsoft.com/officedev/

Also many books are available for purchase from the usual outlets.

 

 

Section 2 The World Wide Web and Beyond

A Hypothetical Case Study

Imagine you are assigned as the new Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Head of Information Technology (I.T.) of a medium size international company, with 5 locations, employing 1000 people globally.  You produce “Dongles”; small cables connecting PCMCIA cards to different computer peripherals and sell them to computer equipment manufacturing units and commercial retail outlets worldwide with an annual turnover of $7 million U.S. Dollars (USD).  Your offices are in Sunnyvale, California; Dublin, Ireland; Bangkok, Thailand; Sydney, Australia; and your headquarters, Boston, Massachusetts.  You have spent a lot of effort and time resolving Year 2000 (Y2K) issues and now you have the Euro-Dollar (EUD) to contend with and an ever-widening electronic commerce market.  The directors of the company make a decision to invest in an e-Commerce solution and to finally upgrade from Office 95, which cannot handle the Euro-dollar (EUD) and in certain circumstances is not Y2K compliant.

At your headquarters in Boston, your team provide support for Oracle Financials systems, controlling your organization’s internal accounting and payroll for all other offices.  The other international sites link to the main financial system through sub-servers that replicate to the master database.  Thailand and Ireland host the manufacturing facilities, also running Oracle financials with an ERP/SAP solution.  Dublin, Sydney and Sunnyvale are sales and distribution points for the product tide to the main financial system through terminal access. 

The company has decided that the e-Commerce solution should be implemented alongside the sales groups, with a back end of Oracle SQL Server in conjunction with Netscape Internet Servers.  Your internal intranet is based on a custom solution, developed internally using Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and an Access database for Document management.  Tivoli is used for network management and the help desk consists of 27 I.T. support personnel located at each of the sites. 

In keeping with a forward focus the I.T. team chose Windows NT as the desktop operating system and core user-networking environment and back-office servers.  Your boss has asked you to revamp the front-end desktop keeping in mind the Intranet, Extranet, and e-Commerce scenario.   You must also consider the legacy and core system servers and establish a central call centre for help-desk services and support for the entire enterprise.

After all the haranguing, meetings with vendors and your team, and market research you choose to deploy Microsoft Office 2000.  You come to this decision based on the current user knowledge base of Microsoft Office products, experience of support personnel and their requirements and the advertised globalisation and webification of Office 2000.  You start with a design for configuration management and user definitions for the installation of Office 2000:

 

 

	Role	Description
	Basic User	Office Standard – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook
	Web Developer	Office Professional – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Access, Publisher (Small Business Tools not installed by design)
	Web Publisher	Office Premium – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher, FrontPage, PhotoDraw, Small Business Tools
	System Engineer	Office Professional – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook (Publisher and Small Business Tools not installed)
	Financial	Office Professional – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Small Business Tools, Publisher
	Executive	Office Professional – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Small Business Tools, Publisher
	Mobile Users	Office Professional - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Small Business Tools, Publisher

 

You realize that other applications will be necessary; however you are willing to research and extend as much of the business process into the Office 2000 environment.  Because of your Microsoft front-end focus you add Internet Explorer 5.0 to the desktop and migrate your current Unix based mail system to Microsoft Exchange 5.5 Enterprise edition.  You establish your central Help-desk database system through Microsoft Exchange’s collaboration services, with the primary site located at your Boston facility.

The question remains: how does Microsoft Office 2000 integrate into this system?  On a company-needs basis, here is a basic description of the implementation rationale and conclusions.

For the Help-Desk Support Group

Help desk personnel benefit from having a combination of server-based and workstation-based installations.  Version control is maintained by establishing an install server with core files for Office 2000.  Rules are created on a network group account basis.  The auto-repair features and installation correction functions allow Office 2000 to repair itself at start-up of a user session from the install server based on this group account information.  This scenario also allows for a limited type of licence compliance policy management on the network domain.  This will reduce the number of user calls related to system failure surrounding the Office product.  Although user knowledge is a plus here, user familiarisation calls will still continue as there are many new features to deal with and the migration process must be planned to occur over a specified period of time.  The modularity of the Office Suite allows the application versions to be maintained at a central site, with only necessary components, such as language modules and fonts, to be deployed; as the core executables are now the same for all international versions.

 

For the Intranet, Internet, E-Commerce, and Collaboration

Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Publisher are used for web page design at a departmental level.  At the enterprise level the Webmaster can manage and develop the corporate web site using FrontPage.  Web site management of the Netscape enterprise server is done using IIS and alias directories that have been mapped to the primary IIS server.  A custom web page is designed to interface with the help desk system on exchange using the Access VB development system.  The custom document management system based on MS-SQL server with a web front-end is also developed using Access VB.  All documents are created in Word or Publisher and digitally signed using Verisign technology, then posted to the web as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.  The Acrobat reader plug-in is an integral part of the core desktop. Corporate policy requires that all master documents are now only official on the Intranet; printed copies are for resource only and not to be considered official unless ink signed by the document management director.

Microsoft Access is used to develop Front-end Web applications that can access and maintain both the Oracle financials systems using SQL scripts, and Microsoft’s own SQL Server through Microsoft Access’s native interface to MS-SQL Server.  The Webmaster can then manage these database pages using FrontPage and Access.  Excel is used to develop OLAP enabled pivot tables for maintaining data and data reporting from the Oracle financials databases.  The focus is on creating a unified user interface that does not require investment in other applications, which may have compatibility issues with the current set-up.

Exchange is configured as a web server with the Exchange Active Server Pages (*.asp) installed and IIS for “Web Outlook”.  This is especially useful for mobile users for whom standard network access is not possible.  With web access to the various databases, the travelling representative can access various data to help him/her complete their assigned tasks.  Behind the firewall, access is granted on a dial-up user basis and configuration changes can be scheduled to occur only across standard LAN interfaces rather than across the MODEM interface.  Microsoft Internet Lookup Server has been installed for use with Netmeeting, an Internet Explorer application that allows voice over IP, chat, desktop VTC, shared applications and whiteboard applications for online meetings and conference calls.  Netmeeting, a collaboration tool provided with Internet Explorer, can be integrated with Microsoft Outlook.  This, with the introduction of a voicemail server would allow for the reduction of costs in communications needs, both internally and externally, providing a powerful communications medium, which includes, voicemail integrated into Microsoft Exchange, for all personnel.  Further investigation is needed here to analyse the impact this may have on the network bandwidth and performance.

The e-Commerce solution also benefits from the broad range of web support built into Office.  This makes solutions uniform and easier to develop across the enterprise and maintain at a departmental level.  Event generation allows business processes to be generated that can initiate workflow solutions that communicate from Boston to Bangkok; ensuring appropriate data flow for the e-Commerce solution.

 

A Management Perspective

One statement here “reduced cost”.  Reduced total cost of ownership, reduced help-desk costs, reduced deployment cost, and reduced training cost.  This is an enterprise solution that is broad in scope and perspective.  Office 2000 is designed to maximize deployment ability, manageability, and functionality, with a strong emphasis on reducing the cost of I.T. in the enterprise network.  It provides for e-commerce and web applications development to extend the desktop environment well into enterprise networks functionality.  This has been done previously only with custom applications developed by software engineers at high cost or through manual inceptions.

 

Section 3 Synopsis

Is Microsoft Office 2000 the ultimate desktop application suite?  It certainly goes a long way down that road; however there is room for improvement and additions.  An ongoing process for any software giant such as Microsoft.  A simple addition would be to incorporate Microsoft Money, the personal and small business financial manager, into the Small Business edition.  Another is to include other engineering and diagram drawing tools into the suite for engineering groups; a partnership with the makers of “Visio” could include it in an engineering version rather than necessitate a separate purchase.  Areas I find of concern are the amount of html code generated by Microsoft applications when creating web pages.  This code may mean something to advanced servers and applications, but for a straight HTML server based on UNIX of network appliances, this code can be seen as “bloat ware”.  There may be a software development kit available for Office and Office VB that can help in this area, but I have not seen any specific references to an API for HTML in the Office Applications.

Also, as usual, Microsoft Office 2000 is very Microsoft centric in design.  This is, however, expected, but I would have preferred to see an Office suite that is more compatible with other enterprise level applications and databases using pure standards or at least interpreting them and translating documents generated by Office 2000 into these standard formats.  Maybe it already does but current information is not easy to filter through to discover how compatible Office really is.  Only a full-fledged test of Office 2000 could provide proof of this.  Even better, more support documentation specifically on this subject from Microsoft.

For those of you concerned with current asset usage.  My test environment consisted of a miss-mash of Intel P5 100-megahertz to 166-megahertz personal computers and a P6 200-megahertz dual processor server.  The minimum memory configuration was 32-megabytes of RAM with a maximum of 128-megabytes.  The operating system environment was Windows NT 4.0, Workstation and Server, Windows NT 5.0 Workstation Beta 2, and Windows 2000 Professional Beta 3.  The 100-megahertz system was in fact a notebook computer with 32-begabytes of RAM, a 1.2-gigabytes hard disk drive, and multimedia capabilities.  The notebook was tested with Windows 2000 Professional Beta 3 as the operating system.  In all cases, performance was not exemplary, but was acceptable.  Given that this application suite is designed primarily with newer, state-of-the-art, PII 233-megahertz or higher systems and relatively abundant RAM and disk space; performance could be considered, outstanding.  More notable was that Windows 2000 Beta 3 helped improve performance of the applications on similarly configured installations. 

So were does that leave the consumer of Microsoft products?  Very simply put, this is a powerful implementation with an unlimited potential for web and e-Commerce design and development.  As the world moves closer to the Internet and e-Commerce, Office 2000 is perfectly poised to fit within an organization for ensuring consistent design and implementation standards worldwide.  Reduction of cost is a major bonus, but the real power here is the Internet.  If your organization has no need for the Internet then an upgrade to Office may not be immediately on the cards.  If you are using Office 97, the needs here are not as great.  However, any implementation of Office 95 or earlier versions of Office, in conjunction with a need for moving to the web and e-Commerce gives a powerful incentive to migrate to the new suite.

Personally, would I buy Office 2000?  Most definitely, but then is there really any other choice to consider?  I have tried to honestly present an unbiased view of this application suite, but the feature rich environment combined with application familiarity is very hard to ignore.  Microsoft Office remains the premier Office Automation suite available today with an unequalled installation and knowledge base.  Section two of this document, presenting a hypothetical case study, was based on a fictional situation, but I would not be surprised if it sounded familiar to many CIO’s around the world who face similar day-to-day decisions.  Office 2000 is definitively an application suite to consider.