Weekly Review: Microsoft Works in Web Services

The launch of Microsoft Office XP last Thursday (May 31st) gave a perfect illustration of how online services are gradually seeping into everyday use. Important features in XP rely on Web-based services for their operation, but few users will be aware of their increasing dependence on external, Internet-based resources for their successful use of the new version of Office. As long as the product helps them get their work done faster and more effectively, it hardly matters to them whether the various components execute locally or across the Net.

• Application Error Reporting automatically reports errors and crashes straight back to Microsoft (subject to user confirmation), giving the company immediate feedback on bugs and other problems. According to senior VP and Office visionary Steven Sinofsky, this feature has already helped Microsoft identify and fix the main causes of Office crashes during beta testing with 250,000 users. Enterprises can modify this feature to send the error data back to their own IT support staff.
• Product Activation is a new feature introduced by Microsoft to prevent what it calls "casual piracy." When retail customers install XP, they have to obtain an activation code from the company, which verifies that the licence is not already installed by another user. Although the process can be done by making a phone call, most users will opt for online activation, which Microsoft says takes around four seconds.
• Send for Review adds a peer-to-peer (P2P) dimension to Office, enabling users to send a document out for review as an email attachment directly from the orginating application. XP handles version management throughout the revision process and can merge multiple contributions from various respondents into a single document for final evaluation.
• SharePoint Team Services is a whole new family of collaboration services hosted on a Web server that can either be internal to the organisation or at an external service provider. It offers a subset of the features available when using Microsoft's new SharePoint Portal Server, including shared files, events calendar and contact lists, as well as an online discussion forum.
• Smart Tags are context-sensitive clickthroughs that allow users to access potentially useful functions and services. Those functions can be anywhere — on a user's machine, a local server or an external web site. One Smart Tag service available at launch, for example, provides up-to-date airline flight information provided by OAG Worldwide.

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