Office 2000 Beta 1 released, includes FrontPage 2000

Microsoft Corporation announced on Monday the shipment of Office 2000 Beta1 to over 20,000 partners, corporations, and individual beta testers.Office 2000 Beta 1 will ship with the first beta of FrontPage 2000, whichwill be packaged with certain versions of Office 2000. The company alsorefuted recent reports by stating in a press release that it intends torelease Office 2000 "this fall."

"We're excited to provide so many customers with Beta 1 at this early stageso they can begin evaluating some of the great new Web collaborationfeatures in Office 2000," said Steven Sinofsky, general manager for Officeproducts. "We've made some big investments so the Web will really work forour customers, without asking them to learn a host of new tools."

The primary improvement in Office 2000 is widespread Web integration. AllOffice products will be able to save a read HTML natively, while retainingfull compatibility with the wide range of features Word, Access, Excel,PowerPoint, and Outlook users are used to.

The integration of FrontPage with Office has been rumored for some time:Today's announcement confirms that Office 2000 users will get FrontPage2000 in the box. Microsoft describes FP2K as a "total Web solution" forcreating and managing Web sites that will house the HTML documents userscan now so easily create with Office 2000.

For more information about Office 2000, please visit Microsoft's Office2000 Preview Web site