Step into my office - Microsoft's Office 97 productivity suite - Product Information

Software Magazine, March, 1997 by Anne Harrison

After investing $200 million dollars and 25,000 hours of usability research, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., is banking on big returns from its Office 97 productivity suite. At a January launch in New York City, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates presented the suite as the centerpiece of the firm's Internet strategy enabling users to author, link and navigate online documents. Three million copies of the suite have already been presold through corporate licensing agreements and many early users are integrating Office 97 into company-wide upgrade strategies.

Michael Pinckney, research director of electronic workplace technologies at the Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn., says the release of Office 97 corresponds with the increasing pace of corporate change in hard- ware, operating systems and software suites, which are paving the way for new productivity applications. "There is an upgrade cycle and people are just starting to make a move," says Pinckney.

Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, Tenn., has become a model for large-scale migration to Office 97. As a participant of Microsoft's Office 97 early adopter program, the company is standardizing its 10,000 worldwide desktops from a collection of Office appli-cations. The suite will be preinstalled in a hardware upgrade to Dell Computer Corp.'s desktop and notebook computers. According to Pete Eldridge, who coordinates Eastman's global workstation initiative, the combina- tion of faster processing power and speedier applications is expected to translate into $15 million in cost savings over the next three years.

Toronto-based Ontario Hydro is antici- pating that its move to Office 97 will change the way its employees manage data. The company is upgrading a total of 4,000 desktops from Office 95 and Versions 4.2 and 4.3. According to Olav Hanrath, technical coordinator, the company will deploy new workstations with Office 97 preinstalled and dis-tribute the software through Microsoft's System Management Server (SMS) and sneakernet.

Once deployed, Hanrath says, Office 97's enhanced networking applications will let employees generate HTML documents that were formerly created by company specialists. Office 97's word processing application, Word 97, and PowerPoint 97 both save documents in HTML and embed live links on a page. The Excel 97 spreadsheet application allows users to embed URLs in formulas. Hanrath says the built-in capacity to create these documents is a real bonus. "We would like our intranet to become the focus of how employees get information," says Hanrath. "We want the person who authors the document to be the person who posts the document." Hanrath says he's concerned that files created in Word 97 can't be opened in earlier versions of Word, making it potentially difficult to share documents with others. Word 97 can read older files, but those using older Word versions need special translator software to view or edit any file created in Word 97. The issue isn't stalling deploy- ment, says Hanrath, but he plans to set defaults to save documents in Office 95 until each company divi-sion adapts.

While shifting file formats take some adjustment, Microsoft says Office 97 is de- signed to decrease administrative and support costs. Vincent Mirante, a technical support specialist at I/B/E/S/International Inc. in New York City, is converting 150 desktops in several worldwide locations at an estimated cost of $300 per desktop. He says the financial services company is particularly impressed with the suite's Office Assistant, a new animated help system intended to reduce help desk queries. "People find it very helpful," says Mirante. "It provided the answer to the question before they figured out what the question was."

Larry Sikon, director of technical services for San Francisco-based Montgomery Securities, is overseeing his company's migration from Office 95 to Office 97 on 2,000 desktops, an upgrade he says is much less painful than the firm's shift from Mac to NT last year. The software will be deployed on Microsoft SMS and via a system swap for portable users. Sikon says he is particularly pleased with Office's Outlook 97, which integrates E-mail, scheduling, contacts, tasks and access to documents. "My perception of 97 is that it is a far better product," says Sikon. "The components work together much better and Outlook is far superior to the Schedule Plus apps that we were using previously. It provides a much nicer ease of use."