Microsoft shows off Office 2000

Microsoft began public demonstrations of its next Office suite this week atthe PC Expo tradeshow in New York. Now officially named Office 2000, Microsoft said the suite would begin beta testing this July with over20,000 testers, about 10 times the usual number. The company is hoping toship it in late 1998, but an early 1999 release is likely.

"We made lowering the total cost of ownership and simple upgrades of Officethe number one priority for the development team," said Jon DeVaan, VP of desktop applications at Microsoft.

HTML has been integrated into the suite and is now a "companion format" tothe more familiar Office file formats. Office users will be able to savedocuments as HTML files and choose a Web server as the target save locationso that files can be easily distributed over the Internet. New Webcomponent technology will let users edit Office 2000 documents right intheir Web browsers, even if the document is on a remote Web server.

"Office 2000 is being designed to help customers turn information into anasset. Office 2000 will break existing barriers, making information easy tofind, view and secure, by extending Office to the Web," said DeVaan. "SinceOffice has become so critical to our customers, we're planning a broad first beta so they can test Office 2000 in their existing environments."

One thing you definitely won't be seeing in the next version of Office isvoice recognition. Microsoft says the technology just isn't ready, despitethe fact that competitors--including Corel WordPerfect--are adding thefeature to their next products.

"We believe in [voice recognition], but it's not ready for prime time," said Microsoft Office product manager Matthew Price. "Voice recognition isin the experimental phase. With 90% accuracy rates, that's one out of every10 words wrong. We're not going to do it.