Microsoft To Show Off New Tablet PC Features, Office 11

Microsoft

The devices, under development by such hardware OEMs as Acer, Toshiba and Compaq, will officially debut Nov. 7, a Microsoft executive said Monday.

Tablet PCs, which run Windows XP Tablet Edition, feature a convertible screen that can be used as a standard display with keyboard input, or be twisted around to form a clipboard form factor and accept handwritten input. These devices have been demonstrated at least since Comdex, last November. (See related story) And they will be demonstrated again Tuesday at the kickoff PC Expo keynote here by Microsoft Group Vice President Jeff Raikes.

Microsoft will also demonstrate Snippet, a tool that will let Tablet PC users clip a news item from, say, an online source, then annotate it and send it along via e-mail, Raikes said.

Raikes said he will also preview a new Tablet PC application from Corel that will let users take a Web page and use onion-skin overlays to annotate the content. There can be any number of people applying their own annotations, and the onion skin fades when it is not the one in focus, Raikes said.

Longer term, Raikes sees a day when Tablet PCs will be coupled with directional microphones that will facilitate digital taping of meetings. "You could record your conversation, ink notes in with a time stamp and with voice transcription" and be able to go back later and listen to key passages, Raikes said. "That could have a huge impact on personal productivity," he noted.

At the show, Microsoft will also announce that Office 11, the next major release of its desktop application suite, will debut in mid-2003, he said. The release will pack in many more knowledge worker features to help users find and access heretofore disconnected islands of data, Raikes said.

"Office is the cornerstone, the foundation for us to connect to these islands. Right now [Office users are not well connected to SAP or Siebel. That's not a criticism of those companies, it's an opportunity for us," he noted.

Office 11 will add more XML support, in that it will be better able to automatically handle arbitrary schema, Raikes said.

With Office 11, the company hopes to build on its SmartTags expertise to provide better links to back-end data and Web services. SmartTags are live links in Office documents that can take the user to Web- or intranet-based information. The Outlook mail client in Office 11 will also help users alleviate "e-mail fatigue" with smart folders to help them categorize and process incoming mail.

In other news, Raikes said Microsoft will package Sharepoint Team Services 2.0 with its upcoming Windows .Net Server. That would enable users to easily set up collaborative Web sites for work teams. The new STS 2.0 technology, which will be made available as an add-on to .Net Server soon after it ships, will add more templates to make it easier to set up professional-looking sites.

An earlier version of STS was bundled with Office XP last year. "The goal was to figure out how to help 300 million Office users to put their sites up without having to use developer tools," Raikes said.

Raikes is hoping the one-two punch of Tablet PCs, which the company sees as replacements to more traditional laptops for professionals, and Office 11 will spark upgrade spending. "Look, by mid-2003, it'll have been quite awhile since the Y2K upgrades," he noted.