Look for Microsoft Office XP to hit the market in late June early July, bringing with it Internet-based services that simplify workgroup collaboration. A new workflow process for managing revisions is easier than in previous versions.
You can send documents for review and share them over a shared server. You also can update Web queries easily in Microsoft Excel and check Hotmail and MSN mail directly from Outlook.
Microsoft also has built in an OCR package and speech recognition. But don't expect much hype about the latter, because Microsoft knows that speech recognition technology needs plenty of work before it's truly valuable. I'm especially impressed by usability enhancements in Office XP, which make useful features easier to find while hiding the stuff that drives me crazy, like the animated paper clip. My favorites are Task Panes, which pop up on the side of the screen for selecting new formats, and pop-up SmartTags, which let you quickly select a name from your address book and drop it into a letter.
You may not need to upgrade, but Office XP can make everyday tasks easier. We'll have plenty of details on Office XP and its competition in our next issue.
The Return of Copy Protection
Microsoft is doing more than ever to make sure you're not pirating its software. If you decide to upgrade to Office XP or Windows XP, you'll see what I mean.
You still need a key to install the software, but you'll also need to take the extra step of registering your copy. You can skip the registration window a few times, but after that the software will shut down. Technically, you only need to type in your country, but Office XP also asks you for your name and address.
The antipiracy efforts don't stop here. The license agreement lets you install Office XP both on your office desktop and on one other computer, which is most likely to be a notebook. But if you try to install Office XP on a different system, Microsoft will want to know what you're up to, and you'll need to contact the company. You can reinstall the software on the same computer, but if you have made too many changes to the computer, the software may ask you to call Microsoft before proceeding.
I understand the motivation to protect software from illegal copying. There are too many people out there making and selling illegal copies. But in the past, copy protection schemes have only made life hard on legitimate users. They didn't effectively stop pirating. Will this approach work any better? Most corporate users will stick with Microsoft, but I suspect that the people who were "borrowing" copies for personal use will opt for the less expensive office suites (Corel WordPerfect Suite, Lotus SmartSuite, and ThinkFree Office) or even the free suites, such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice.
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