Office System touts time benefits
Published: 27 Oct 2003 12:25 GMT
The last time Microsoft updated its Office productivity package, one of the company's most reliable moneymakers and one of its most mature and predictable products, the big news was the disappearance of Clippy, the animated helper customers loved to hate.
No such problem this time around. Tuesday's launch of the new Office System included a handful of new products and major changes to existing applications that are intended to position them as part of a broad platform for interacting with corporate data.
New XML (Extensible Markup Lanugage)-based functions in familiar programs such as Word and Excel expand their role as purely local applications. New applications such as InfoPath, an ambitious attempt to apply electronic forms to internal business processes, and SharePoint collaborations tools further blur the distinction between desktop and server.
But Jeff Raikes, vice president of Microsoft's Productivity and Business Services group, insists that XML "plumbing" is beside the point -- the real news is that the new Office will buy harried workers a few more minutes in their day. He points to a recent third-party study that concludes that Office 2003 improves efficiency enough to save the average office worker two hours a week. "I think the kind of benefits you see in Office 2003, where information worker productivity can be improved by up to two hours per week, where you can have the kind of cumulative impact where you can pay for the investment in eight months on average -- that has to be at the core of what we do," he said.
Raikes spoke with CNET News.com in conjunction with the Office System launch.
Q: There are a lot of new things -- XML, digital rights management and other stuff -- in Office. What do you think is the big story with the new Office?
A: The biggest story, really, is the transformation. People have historically had a narrow view of what Office means to them and their productivity. With Office 2003, and in particular establishing the Office System concept, we're very clearly... signalling a major transformation of what we're doing with Office and our aspiration to really help people in the broad facets of information work.
You're focusing a lot on services and resources that connect to the Office application. Has a limit been reached as far as how much you can do with the application itself?
I don't think so. The improvements in Outlook are client improvements. The research service from within Word or Excel -- those are ways in which you improve your own personal productivity. Those have direct impact on the user. I guess the only thing I'd hesitate on is if people sort of confuse these things with not being personal. They are very much personal productivity improvements, and they emanate from Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
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