The release of Microsoft Office 2003 on 21 October will be good news for the channel, says Justin Agar, Microsoft product manager at Axiz, a broad-based distributor.
He says the new Basic Edition gives resellers better choice and more beneficial price points.
The update will launch with three editions for resale via the delivery service partner channel, namely Office Professional, Small Business Edition and the latest version, Basic. Agar says Basic is "essentially a light version" of Office, incorporating Outlook, Excel and Word.
"The Basic Edition is of most importance to the channel. It will be the lowest-cost commercially available version of Office to date. In the past, resellers have been forced to sell either Small Business Edition or Professional, at a proportionately higher price for additional applications that have frequently been surplus to their customers` requirements."
Key new features in Office 2003 include:
- The ability to save Word and Excel files in a native XML file format, and manipulating and exploring this information in any program that can process XML;
- Tracking opportunities and management of sales leads in Outlook with Business Contact Manager;
- The ability to view all e-mails, tasks, calendar items, notes and files related to a specific account or contact in one place;
- Saving PowerPoint presentations onto CD-ROM;
- A spam folder and junk filtering; and
- A research task pane in applications that accesses electronic dictionaries, thesauruses, online research sites and translation.
Agar concludes: "Since the interface in the new edition will be familiar to users, there will be a minimal adjustment period required for upgrading. An added functionality is that any time an application stops responding, the system will automatically save the work using a document recovery feature."
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