VARs Await Debut Of Office 2003

The Oct. 21 retail launch is the last in a series of firsts for the delayed Office Systems 2003 lineup that was to have debuted with much hoopla four months earlier.

Microsoft released Office products to manufacturing on Aug. 19, after a "refresh" beta 2 rolled off the presses in late June.

And solution providers are champing at the bit, hoping the array of Office SKUs and component applications, ranging from the usual Word and Excel upgrades to the brand-new InfoPath and OneNote, will jump-start corporate interest in applications and even integration services.

That means Office 2003 is a big deal, not only for large account resellers such as Software Spectrum and ASAP Software, which specialize in volume licensing deals, but also for solution providers that do systems integration and application development work.

"For integrators, this opens up a lot more opportunity to create new business based on what's already in place. Upgrades are part of Software Assurance or licensing, so many customers will automatically go to [the new] Office. That presents a new opportunity for VARs who've set up business applications on the back end to join them with scads of power users," said Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Yankee Group.

InfoPath, which promises to link back-end server-based processes and applications with popular front-end applications, is of particular interest to solution providers.

InfoPath solves the "last- mile problem," said Burley Kawasaki, CTO of Equarius, a solution provider in Bellevue, Wash. "How do you bridge the gap from back-end systems to the end user? You could always build a custom Web app or use a traditional workflow app, but InfoPath gives a very easy and lightweight way to automate a complete end-to-end business process using BizTalk to automate system-to-system, system-to-human, and human-to-human processes."

Others agreed that the Office front-end/Windows Server 2003 back-end combo could fulfill Microsoft's promise for true end-to-end integration.

"For the longest time, the desktop dev teams didn't really work with the server dev teams, so you ended up with Office products that didn't even work properly with the Microsoft server products," said Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, Oakland, Calif.

Morimoto said his company typically concentrated on server implementations, but with the beta versions of Office family members Exchange 2003, SharePoint 2003 and Office itself, he now sees one-quarter of the company's business focusing on desktop-related projects.

"The desktop has really become an important, integral part of the whole business office," Kawasaki said. While Microsoft has talked about the "connected office" for some time, this is the reality of having a Windows XP Service Pack 1 and Office 2003 on the desktop, connected to Exchange 2003, Windows 2003, SharePoint 2003 [and] Live Communication Server 2003 on the back end as a full business solution.

"This is a big thing for us to help organizations plan, upgrade desktops, integrate the new Office 2003 components into day-to-day business functions and needs, and linking them in to their back-end Exchange messaging [and] file/print infrastructure," Morimoto said.

Large account resellers are similarly enthused. "We expect Office System 2003 to have a major impact on sales activity in the next few months,and not just because of its new features. While the launch date of Oct. 21 is widely known, it's important to note that it becomes available in the volume licensing channel at the beginning of September," said Paul Jarvie, president and CEO of ASAP Software, Buffalo Grove, Ill.

But Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Productivity and Business Services at Microsoft, has said that one of Microsoft's biggest hurdles is moving customers off older Microsoft products. Unless users see compelling reasons to move, they won't,especially in this tough economy.

Others are more cautious about expectations.

"I see the uptick as being fairly modest [because] much of the new functionality is actually delivered by server products, the new SharePoint," said Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions On Microsoft. "A lot of the Outlook stuff requires the Titanium version of Exchange. %85 That's a very significant systemwide upgrade %85 requiring the new server operating system as well."