REDMOND, Wash., September 14, 1998 — As 20,000 customers and solution providers begin evaluating the first beta of Microsoft Office 2000, the newest version of the world’s most popular productivity suite, early reviews by industry experts show strong support for Office 2000’s new direction and technological advances. ( Read recent reviews of Office 2000 .)
The new version of Office is designed to be a more efficient, allowing customers to publish, share and edit Web documents easily. The revised suite offers tighter integration with the Web, better collaboration and more powerful analysis tools, with easy installation and migration features.
Office 2000 makes the Web work for customers by allowing them to create and share Web documents while using a set of familiar tools. FrontPage, Microsoft’s best-selling Web site creation and management tool, will be included in a high-end version of Office 2000 to allow mainstream users to create and manage Web sites to house documents.
Early reviews of Office 2000’s have concentrated on the product’s substantial new features and functionality, which are categorized in three main areas: Web collaboration; analysis tools; and personal productivity features and tools. Office 2000 offers cutting-edge Web-enabled collaboration and information sharing through a new work style that integrates core productivity tools with the Web to streamline the process of sharing information and working with others. Office 2000 has elevated HTML as a companion file format alongside its proprietary binary formats, making seamless file sharing and universal readability feasible.
Many of the reviews highlight Office 2000’s new analysis tools, which make it easier to use an organization’s intranet to access vital business information and help users make better, more timely business decisions.
Office’s legacy has always been its ability to empower the end-user to be more productive, and the new suite is no different. As early reviews describe, Office 2000 continues its legacy with new features, such as an adaptive user interface that customizes to users as they work, and the new collect-and-paste tool, which allows users to assemble up to 12 images and text on the Office Clipboard and then paste when ready.
Office 2000 aspires to be the most efficient Office suite by delivering new levels of resiliency and intelligence while enabling users and organizations to get up and running quickly, to keep working, and to achieve great results with fewer resources. Judging from the early reviews, that’s exactly what Microsoft is accomplishing with Office 2000.