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Office 2003: Should you upgrade?

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 10 Mar 2003 15:49 GMT

"An easy way to positively impact your business." That's how Microsoft is describing Office 2003, which premieres today in the form of a 15-disc beta kit that will soon be appearing in about 500,000 mailboxes. That's real, old-fashioned postal mailboxes: this is a lot of software.

Take a moment to savor the chutzpah it takes to hand someone more than a dozen CDs -- weighing almost 500g -- and then claim that whatever happens next will be "easy." Then remember that this is Microsoft we're talking about, and that the normal rules don't apply.

In this case, the hype isn't completely off base: given the chance, Office 2003 could indeed have a positive impact on your business. Is it easy? Well, that depends.

While I'm barely getting started with this latest beta release (having just received my copy on Friday), my experience so far is that the applications are all stable enough to play with -- in fact, I'm writing this column in Word 2003. However, to get the real benefits from Office 2003, you'll need at least one new server, some power-user skills, and the persuasiveness to talk your coworkers into changing the way they work together and your IT department into supporting the whole thing.

I hope you (or people in your company) possess all of the above, because Office 2003 represents a watershed in the not-so-illustrious history of collaboration software, aka "groupware".

Before I explain that, let me fill in a few gaps: today is release day for the second, "public" beta of what used to be called Office 11; the official name of that release is Microsoft Office System Beta 2 Kit 2003. Microsoft is sending it out to a half-million users; if you want a copy, you can sign up here. The final product is due out this summer, but I don't expect many users to actually see it on their desktops before 2004.

People who pay careful attention will note that what used to be called the Office "family" is now the Office "system". The idea is that this isn't merely a collection of applications; it's a way of doing work. The change makes it very clear that you can no longer get the most out of Office all by yourself.