Just What Is Microsoft Office System?

Microsoft Office System, which will be launched officially on Oct. 21 and hit some retail shelves in September, represents a compendium of products -- from the new Office 2003 productivity suite to SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003 and Live Communications Server 2003, and others -- that exploit XML to bridge the chasm between desktop data and back office systems.

The remaining components in Office System include Live Meeting, InfoPath 2003 and OneNote 2003 (which addresses handwriting recognition for Tablet PCs), according to Microsoft.

Microsoft has made the package attractive from a pricing perspective as well. Office 2003 Editions pricing will remain essentially the same as its predecessor, Office XP. Estimated retail pricing (ERP) for Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 is $399; and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 is $499. Prices for stand-alone programs inside the suite are also unchanged: $229 for Word 2003, Excel 2003, Access 2003 and PowerPoint 2003, and $109 for Outlook 2003. The ERP for InfoPath 2003 is $199, while OneNote 2003 lists at $199.

According to Microsoft officials, Office System's support for XML and other industry standards will enable "seamless communication between Microsoft Office programs and applications from independent software vendors, and lays a foundation for the addition of real-time data and Web services for even greater business value."

One industry analyst agreed that Office System makes a compelling package for ISVs and solution providers who focus on adding value through software customization.

"If developers can create a coordinated document trail and creation path using the new Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and [Live Communication] servers as the platform to interact with CRM or ERP, for example, then we are finally getting to the point where one hand is talking to the other, rather than having scads of documents [on clients] that can't be related to back-end processes," says Dana Gardner, industry analyst at Boston-based Yankee Group.

In effect, the Office System amalgam creates a tiered architecture in which Office 2003 applications such as Word and Excel sit on top, Sharepoint and Exchange servers occupy the middle (much like an application server) and a variety of services operate below that, using XML tie client data into databases, enterprise applications and back end servers. This finally enables those zillions of static, but critical documents and spreadsheets created in Office to escape individual user hard drives and interact dynamically in an IT-wide transaction or workflow.

And though each product will continue to be made available separately, one-off sales are clearly not the Redmond, Wash.-based company's objective.

"Office System is a major piece of Microsoft's larger message, which is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," says Gardner. "They are trying to make you an offer you can't refuse. The more you do on Office System, the more bulk you have on Windows System. They are Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum."