REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 28, 2001 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a corporate preview release of Office XP, the new version of Microsoft® Office, the world’s best-selling desktop application suite. Through the Corporate Preview Program, more than 500,000 corporate customers will have the opportunity to preview and experience innovations that simplify individual productivity, enable effective team collaboration and provide flexible and reliable business solutions for organizations. Office XP beta 2 had previously been sent to approximately 10,000 customers, and customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The Corporate Preview Program will expand customer evaluation and review of Office XP to customers in more than 30 countries.
“We’re extremely excited to reach this milestone for Office XP,”
said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Office at Microsoft.
“Office XP delivers a broad range of new opportunities for everyone in an organization — from the individual user to the IT administrator — and we are thrilled to deliver the preview release of Office XP to hundreds of thousands of corporate customers.”
Early Customer Enthusiasm for Office XP
Customer feedback on Office XP has been tremendously positive. With Office XP, customers will be able to easily use and control a broader set of Office features and effortlessly access information from multiple sources, enabling them to quickly create and deliver professional information and improve their overall productivity. Customers also will be able to easily work with other people through new e-mail-based document collaboration and annotation technologies, as well as a new prebuilt team Web site solution called SharePoint™
Team Services.
“Office XP offers a wide breadth of great solutions, like SharePoint Team Services, that will significantly improve the productivity and collaboration capabilities of people in our organization,”
said Andy Drooker, vice president of Network System Architecture and Research and Development of Turner Broadcasting Inc.
“Because of Office XP’s ease of use and intuitive nature, people can communicate and work with others in an efficient, seamless way without having to learn entirely new tools.”
Organizations also can use Office XP as a solutions platform by building flexible and reliable business solutions that leverage the familiar Office user interface.
“We’re using Office XP as a platform to build rich, custom instructional applications based on the standard data analysis tools in Excel,”
said Deirdre Woods, senior director, Wharton Computing and Information Technology, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“The power of Office XP significantly changes Wharton’s educational experience by letting us use Excel as the engine for analyzing and displaying dynamic content.”
Corporate Preview Program Availability
The corporate preview release will include the latest versions of Microsoft Word 2002 word processing software, Microsoft Outlook® 2002 messaging and collaboration client, Microsoft Excel 2002 spreadsheet application, Microsoft PowerPoint® 2002 presentation graphics program, Microsoft Access 2002 database application and the Microsoft FrontPage® 2002 Web site creation and management tool, as well as various multilanguage packs. The corporate preview release can be evaluated and used until Aug. 31, 2001. The release kit costs $19.95 (which includes shipping and handling) and will be available while supplies last. Corporate customers can order it from http://www.microsoft.com/office/xpcorpbeta.htm . The corporate preview release will automatically be delivered to MSDN® developer program Professional and Universal subscribers in their March shipment.
About Office XP
Office XP presents people with the tools needed to work smarter. Office XP greatly improves personal productivity through simplifying the way people work and providing tools that people can rely on; enables collaboration by making it easy to collaborate on documents and work more effectively with others; and extends Office beyond the desktop by enabling people to integrate additional services into Office and easily access information any time. Office XP will be broadly available in the first half of 2001.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software – any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, SharePoint, Outlook, PowerPoint, FrontPage and MSDN are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
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