-Karthik Padmanabhan,
Product Manager, Office 2000, Microsoft India.
On June 7, Microsoft
globally launched Office 2000, the company's upgrade to the largest selling desktop suite
of products. While Office 95 and Office 97 were productivity leaps for the desktop user,
Office 2000 is expected to be all that, with the web replacing the network for
collaboration. In one stroke, Microsoft has made the debate on collaboration, knowledge
management, messaging and workflow in the networked enterprise irrelevant and moved them
all to the open, flexible and fast-paced world of the web. And even competitors Lotus and
Novell are looking positively at this product release for the huge opportunities and
vistas that it unravels. The product also received tremendous positive response during its
beta testing in the country. Soon after the launch, DATAQUEST solicited responses to
various queries on the product architecture and functionality. Presented here are
highlights of the discussion between Karthik Padmanabhan, Product Manager, Office 2000,
Microsoft, and Arun Shankar, Executive Editor, DATAQUEST. Read on for a first-hand insight
into what promises to become the fastest and largest selling productivity suite of
products yet from the Redmond giant.
lHow would you describe the
technology transition from Office 97 to Office 2000?
I think the best way to put the technology transition in perspective is to outline the key
theme behind Office 97 and Office 2000. With Office 97, we were aiming to create an
integrated desktop productivity suite that was easy to use, but with Office 2000 we are
introducing the concept of the web as a collaboration platform. If I was to summarize the
key technological thinking behind Office 2000, I would say the focus areas in this version
are web-enabled collaboration and information sharing.
Office 2000 offers a new web-based work style that integrates productivity tools with web
streamlining the process of sharing information and working with others. And it makes it
easier to use an organization's intranet. While discussing technology, there are a couple
of other issues that would be relevant to mention. The first of these is the new HTML
companion file format. This, in our opinion, is a real technological wonder since it
liberates the desktop user to a phenomenal extent. Round-tripping HTML as preferred file
format and embedding Word, Excel and PowerPoint files into the browser interface have
become possible in Office 2000.
For Microsoft, the significance of this is in the move away from a proprietary file format
<.doc or .xls> to a more universal standard <.htm>. And we think that is what
collaboration should be about. Being able to work productively and in tandem with people
irrespective of their geographical location, the server on which their LAN is centered or
the hardware and software platform.
Another key development is that we have been able to give users the freedom of choice when
it comes to features and functionality they want out of desktop productivity software.
When we released Office 4 it took up too much space-80MB when an average drive was 110MB.
With Office 97 we take about 160MB, but the typical drive is now around 2GB. We expect
that Office 2000 will be somewhat larger than Office 97 (likely under 200MB), but with the
new 'install on demand' technology, customers have much greater flexibility in this area.
We had an interesting problem with the user interface of Office 2000. We had a lot of user
feedback saying that only 20% of the product functionality was used at any time by a
specific user. But the dilemma was to provide everyone with the specific 20% functionality
they needed. To address this, we have introduced an adaptive user-interface that over the
time makes its simpler to use and naturally provides all the features you need closest at
hand.
In Office 97 more than half the code was shared between applications, which means better
performance. We have also performance tuned the applications to make sure that we only
load into memory the code we need. We have taken this even further with Office 2000 so
customers can at a very granular level determine which features will run on the server
locally, or install on demand.
What are the key differences
between Office 97 and Office 2000 from an enterprise perspective?
In raw business benefit terms, Office 2000 provides advantages by significantly
reducing the cost of PC ownership. Microsoft Office 2000 is designed to reduce the cost of
owning a PC in the enterprise. In large organizations with hundreds or even tens of
thousands of PCs, Office is seldom installed by end-users or by departments. Rather, it is
deployed and managed centrally with different configurations and profiles throughout the
world. Reducing the cost of owning a PC is the highest design priority for Microsoft
Office 2000, which achieves this objective by being easier to deploy, administer, and
maintain.
Office 2000 is expected to enhance integration of the web and the enterprise. It extends
communication to include web publishing for everyone, real-time document collaboration,
and analysis using the web. It is also better integrated with FrontPage and BackOffice.
These product features are expected to make it easier for users to access global
information and back-end databases. User studies indicate that they can often be
overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface. Office 2000 is designed to be simpler and
easier to use than previous versions of Office, with adaptable user menus and improved
user assistance. This should make users of all levels more productive, helping to decrease
support costs.
How is this translated into
enhanced features and benefits for users of Office 2000?
We think that it is in three focus areas that Office 2000 can become a key
productivity tool for end-users. First, web-enabled collaboration with HTML as a companion
file format and seamless round-tripping of files will enable users to overcome many of the
current barriers to web-based productivity which our competitors do not address. Second,
Office 2000 is a software that is not only easy to use but also easy to manage. Finally,
it incorporates the web to make it easier to obtain and analyze corporate data.
Across the global business environment, competition has dramatically changed the way
people work. Not only are employees working more in teams and groups, they also have to
work together quickly and flexibly. Corporate intranets provide a central platform for
workers to collaborate in this way, but till now they have served as only a one-way medium
for viewing information. Office 2000 gives users the tools they need to make the web work
for them. For the first time, users will have a two-way web experience where they can
create, share and collaborate web documents without having to learn new skills or to rely
on web masters with advanced training. Office 2000 applications allow users to save a file
in HTML directly to a web server as easily as saving on their desktop.
End-users often lose time and productivity in unknowingly tampering with system files or
DLLs. In Office 2000, applications are self-repairing and automatically replace the core
files that are missing when an application is launched. We have introduced a new adaptive
user interface, which allows users to personalize their menu and tool bars.
What are the main user concerns
taken into consideration during the development of Office 2000?
There is an interesting point to be made here. Our research showed that 25% of the
features requested by users through the Microsoft Office Wish Line were actually there in
the existing version of the product. This made us realize that product features and
functionalities need to be easier to use and discover. A recent Office 2000 positioning
study recognized several trends, including the fact that competitive pressure is driving
the need for greater productivity, the internet is increasingly being perceived and used
as a relevant business tool and there is a continued and widespread need for improved
communication.
Key findings showed that a majority of respondents considered the ability in Office 2000
to offer internet and intranet technologies to be the most valuable aspect of the suite.
Respondents also cited manageability features suggesting that there is a desire for
software that is easy to manage and use.
How does Office 2000 integrate
with the BackOffice suite of products? And how does that compare with the level of
integration between Office 97 and BackOffice?
I think integration with BackOffice promises to be a great value addition for
enterprise users who need to interact with corporate datawarehouses, datamarts and
large-scale databases. The new versions of Access and Excel come with 'shrink-wrapped'
connectors that make accessing and manipulating data from data stores hassle free. In
fact, the rewritten version of Access provides a common file format with SQL eliminating
the need for programming to retrieve and manipulate data from the back-end. Access will
continue to offer Jet
have additional choices depending on their database needs. By using OLE DB, users will be
able to bypass the Jet engine and connect directly with SQL Server as the back-end data
store. This allows using Access as an interface or front-end client for SQL Server. Since
Excel supports OLE DB for OLAP, Office customers can use the familiarity of Excel to
analyze multi-dimensional data from any back-end database that supports this standard.
What will happen to Office 2000
once Windows 2000 arrives?
There will be an upgrade path specified for Office users after the arrival of Windows
2000. In India, this will be relevant as the Hindi-enabled version of Word will become
available with this offering.
How important is the nature of
the operating system for optimal performance of Office 2000?
Desktop users are running Office on a variety of 32-bit Windows operating systems.
Office is optimized for all of these. For example, Office 2000 users will get additional
support for roaming usage in Windows NT 5. Office 2000 works in existing environments
technology-whether it's NT 5, IE 5, or SQL 7.
Is Microsoft considering Office
2000 for Linux platform?
For the time being, Microsoft will not be developing Office 2000 for Linux. Desktop
applications for end-users need services provided by a robust desktop operating system.
Without these services, an application ISV is often put in the position of providing a
least common denominator functionality or re-implementing services that exist in other
operating systems-and neither of the alternatives are necessarily good for end-users.
Examples of these services include application interoperability, consistent
user-interaction models across the customer base for dialogs, menus, toolbars,
infrastructure for set-up and administration of applications and mechanisms for connecting
to databases and others. Today, Linux is fragmented and its different variants do not
provide a consistent set of these operating system services.
With the integration of the
operating system on client and server in Windows 2000, can we now anticipate integration
between Office 2000 and BackOffice in the next generation?
Absolutely. In fact, we are banking on the great need for such integration and that
has been the underlying philosophy in providing better connectivity for back-end analysis
through tools like Pivot Tables.
Which features of Office 2000
are most relevant in the Indian environment where desktops still have limited network and
processor footprints?
I believe that the need will create the technology and therefore this will soon become
a moot point for India. It is not a distant future when internet in India will become a
part of the corporate life and the corporate network and IT infrastructure will become a
necessity rather than a luxury. And for many in the country, this already holds true.
Given this scenario, Office 2000 actually readies the Indian end-user for such a
situation, and 'web productivity' tools in Office 2000 will help them utilize the
potential of the internet.
Will Office 2000 offer a more
open environment for user deployment and cross application exchanges?
With Office 2000, we are moving away from proprietary file formats to a
universal-standards based one. This means our product will now give cross-platform
interoperability, provided the receiving platform supports universal standards too. The
web is the new platform for collaboration and information sharing, and Microsoft empowers
Office users to capitalize on this. The user can easily shift gears between file formats
and share information across platforms. n