Gates Touts Planned Outlook Connector At Office System 2003 Launch

The Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for MSN will be offered "for a modest subscription" fee, said Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates in a keynote address Tuesday at the Office System Launch in New York City.

That was the news nugget in a phalanx of products that have been announced - and reannounced - several times in the last year. Office System 2003 covers six suites, 11 products, four servers, one service and Solution Accelerators, Office 2003 itself. Outlook 2003 serves as the client for the Exchange 2003 mail server. Gates himself acknowledged that the new Outlook client might be the showstopper in the crowd.

The connector may signal a new push by Microsoft to entrench MSN as a backbone for both consumers and business users. Microsoft Group Vice President Jeff Raikes told CRN a few weeks ago that his "dream is to use MSN as a platform for services to connect people."

Taylor Collyer, director of server marketing for Microsoft Real Time Communications server, said it is fair to say that Microsoft is renewing its push for MSN in businesses beyond the enterprise. "It's appropriate for use in companies without their own IT staffs," he said.

Microsoft also is offering MSN Connect, which will link corporate users of the company's Live Communications Server to the millions of Microsoft instant messaging users outside the firewall, he added.

So far, however, many industry observers view MSN as an America Online wanabee. Yet as AOL itself positions some of its offerings for corporate use--notably instant messaging--Microsoft may be stepping up its corporate push for MSN online business services, which include bCentral.

Microsoft also is creating tighter integration for Outlook with Office applications, MSN and other Microsoft server products as open-source vendors such as SuSE offer e-mail and groupware servers running on Linux that support Outlook clients.

Tuesday's launch marks the first time that Microsoft launched its Office and Exchange products together. It also was the market debut of the company's long-awaited corporate instant-messaging platfom, formerly code-named Greenwich.

PAULA ROONEY contributed to this story.