Microsoft pointed to the Australian Taxation Office, Australia Post and Telstra-owned Web directory provider Sensis as a few of the organisations that could provide Web services that will compel Australia's small and medium-sized businesses to upgrade to its next version of Office.
The release of Microsoft Office 2003 heralds a significant shift in the software titan's strategy as it makes its most concerted attempt yet to embed the Office productivity suite within its enterprise computing platform.
Applications traditionally at the core of the Office package, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, yesterday shared the limelight with a group of around 22 products, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and a new portal server geared to Office 2003, that Microsoft has collectively dubbed "Office System".
Critics of the strategy argued that there was little to compel the smaller scale operations which dominate Australia's business landscape to take on the technical overhead required to exploit Office Systems and upgrade to Microsoft Office 2003.
Answering those concerns Microsoft said it never expected small business to "understand the technology in that way". A spokesperson for Microsoft's small business product group revealed that the software giant expected Office Systems to become a platform upon which larger organisations would deliver Web services to small businesses.
"What small business [could see] is services deliverable from Sensis, Australia Post, the ATO, the banks -- and we're talking to all of those about delivering their services as Web services consumable within Office 2003 using XML for small business," said the spokesperson.
Microsoft also hinted that Office Systems could help accelerate commoditisation of network infrastructure. Telstra and WebCentral have entered an agreement with Microsoft to include its SharePoint Portal Server technologies -- a core piece of the Office Systems platform -- within their Web hosting services. Tony Wilkinson, Microsoft Office product manager argued that this could allow smaller businesses to become part of an electronic supply chain simply by using the office suite.
"In the past if they wanted to get into use that sort of service there was a very high value to entry," said Wilkinson.
Microsoft's vision is to situate Microsoft's core Office applications at the front-end of a Web environment that integrates corporate information resources. Using the XML document standard as a foundation, Office Systems allows Office 2003 applications to interact with back office data sources allowing them to integrate with Web-based enterprise collaboration solutions.
Rodney Hobbs, professional services consultant for Fujitsu Australia, which had been piloting a system based on the new platform for Linfox, described Office Systems as the "key shift" required to provide what he described as "the connected enterprise".
Hobbs argued that previous attempts to gain traction in the enterprise market with office productivity tools failed as they didn't allow users to work in familiar environments. Office Systems, he argued, would allow workers to "work where they want to work".
MS Office has a XML format. Investigate it prior to adopting it.
OpenOffice.org however, has a fully OASIS open standards-based XML schema, which can be relied upon to deliver real XML benefits.
Further, all copies of OpenOffice.org save all their documents as XML by default, unlike MS Office.