Microsoft Group VP Jeff Raikes has amassed a hand-picked squad charged with re-energizing Office sales. Get inside the heads of the key players and discover their next moves for Office.
The Office System 2003 family of products didn't materialize out of thin air. Behind the new suite of Office products that Microsoft Corp. recently released to manufacturing and plans to launch officially on Oct. 21 is the Information Worker (IW) "Gang of Five." This is the senior leadership team assembled by Microsoft's head of productivity and business services, Jeff Raikes, over the past year-plus.
Who are these guys? And how will they support Raikes in his quest to double productivity and reinvigorate Microsoft Office, starting with the launch of Office System 2003?
Microsoft stepped into to the desktop deployment and migration miasma Tuesday with a new package of guidelines, tools and scripts designed to reduce the complexity of large-scale deployments. At the same time, services partner Electronic Data Systems Corp. teamed up with the Redmond, Wash., company to launch a new pay-for-use service framework for provisioning and automating the delivery of new applications.
Microsoft's new Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) is designed to reduce the manual tasks associated with deployment of Windows XP, Office XP and Office 2003 by as much as 75 percent per desktop.
Electronic Data Systems (EDS) is unveiling Wednesday a service to manage the deployment of Microsoft desktop applications and system software in companies and government agencies.
Features of the offering, called myCOE (my Consistent Office Environment), include giving end users flexibility in choosing applications for their desktop and a pricing model under which companies pay only for the services used, according to EDS.
Microsoft has provided partners with an early glimpse of the first official service release for its flagship Windows 2003 Server. It is a closed test and thus no public feedback is being solicited at this time, the company says.
In an e-mail to beta testers, the Microsoft server team wrote, "We are pleased to announce Windows Server 2003 Service Pack IDS build 1039-2 is now available for download at BetaPlace.com. This build is provided for partner evaluation only. This is NOT a preview of the Beta."
XP SP2 has slipped by a year. Longhorn's a moving target. What's going on with Microsoft's cash cow?
The Windows client team is going to have to perform some fancy footwork in the coming months, if it hopes to maintain its traditional momentum. Granted, Microsoft has promised it will deliver a new, interim version of Windows XP for Tablet PCs, as well as an update to its Windows XP Media Center Edition platform during its fiscal 2004. But it looks like there won't be many, if any, updates to the core Windows operating system for quite a while.
From Ditto: We've done it! We are pleased to announce that Microsoft Office System has released to manufacturing! With your efforts in the Office 2003 Pre-Release program helping to provide us with greater amounts of higher quality feedback than we've ever had before, we will ship the greatest set of Office products yet! We wish to extend a hearty thank you for your participation in the pre-release program. You helped make Office 2003 Editions, FrontPage 2003, OneNote 2003, Visio 2003, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services GREAT!
We will begin 'ramping down' our pre-release program, systems and tools using the following plan and timeline:
Newsgroups
On August 25th, most beta O11, SharePoint and Visio newsgroups will be closing down.
Through September 26th, we will maintain the microsoft.beta.sharepoint, microsoft.beta.o11oep.sharepoint and microsoft.beta.o11iep.sharepoint newsgroups only, to allow for migration of hosted SharePoint sites (see below).
Bug Reporting Forms
After August 25th, bug reporting forms at betaplace.com will no longer allow bug submissions.
Hosted Windows SharePoint Services Sites
On August 26th, a migration tool, smigrate.exe, will be posted to betaplace.com for download in order to move hosted WSS content to a 3rd party hosted environment. Additional explanation will be available on the betaplace.com website.
From September 8th through September 12th the hosted environment will be offline for upgrade to RTM. Service will return on September 12th.
On October 31st, the Hosted Windows SharePoint Services sites will be taken down.
Product Support
On August 25th, beta support through the pre-release program for Microsoft Office System products will cease.
BetaPlace Website
On October 1st the Office 2003, Visio 2003 and SharePoint 2003 betaplace.com websites will be taken down.
What can you expect next?
Newsgroups
Public newsgroups are available for continued discussion and peer to peer support at http://microsoft.com/office/community/
Bug Reporting
You can provide feedback to the Office product team by submitting feedback from within Office 2003 applications' Help option. Office Online will provide assistance for submitting feedback on Microsoft Office System products.
Product Support
Options for Microsoft Product Support for shipping products can be found at: http://microsoft.com/office/support/default.asp.
Trial, Evaluation and Full Purchase Products Availability
The following two links will be updated soon with Office 2003 information for your reference: http://microsoft.com/office/techinfo/default.asp, http://microsoft.com/office/howtobuy/default.asp.
Gifts for Technical Beta Testers
We appreciate all you have done to help us test our products. Gifts will be shipping to you by October.
Please email the administrative alias for your beta program with any questions.
Thank you,
The Microsoft Office System Team
Too busy to update your flawed software? Microsoft is considering whether Microsoft, flaws and all, should automatically do it for you. Microsoft said Tuesday it is considering whether to sign up users of future versions of its Windows operating system to a service that automatically downloads and installs software fixes on their computers unless customers specifically opt out of the service.
No decisions have been made, but it is one way the company is considering tightening computer security in the future, after the Blaster worm and other variants infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world since Aug. 11.
Microsoft is making changes to its MSN instant messaging (IM) service that will lock out users of third-party software that uses the service as well as users of older versions of Microsoft's own Messenger client, the company said Tuesday.
Users have to upgrade to the latest versions of MSN or Windows Messenger by Oct. 15 or they will no longer be able to log on, Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall said. The upgrade is required because of "security issues" with the older versions of the Messenger clients, he said, declining to specify those issues.
Besides those older Messenger clients, the move also affects IM software such as Trillian, Imici and Odigo that allow users to consolidate multiple IM accounts in one client, Sundwall said.
Microsoft set an Oct. 21 release date and announced pricing Tuesday for the next version of its Office software package. The final details came with the expected announcement that the core Office applications are complete and ready for distribution to PC manufacturers, who need to test the software in preparation for loading it on new computers. The "release to manufacturing" (RTM) stage is typically the last milestone before a major new software release becomes available to the public.
Ever get the feeling your e-mail list is being watched? By Microsoft?
If so, consider yourself right. Thanks to the expertise of sociologist Marc Smith, Microsoft is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other e-mail lists, which it has identified as the Internet's undervalued "knowledge management application."
In Microsoft's research and development labs, Smith has spent the past several years slicing and dicing data about messages and message authors in an ambitious effort to help people make sense of the newsgroup manifold--the hordes of know-it-alls, flame warriors, spammers and neophytes who, by Smith's estimate, last year numbered more than 100 million in the Usenet network of e-mail threads, or newsgroups.