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Weekly Review: Microsoft Works in Web Services By Phil Wainewright June 4, 2001 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. Universal Canvas These new features begin to change the nature of Office from a suite of desktop applications into something more akin to a gateway from which users transparently access services from near and far. This fits neatly into Microsoft's vision of a Universal Canvas, which featured in the launch of the .Net strategy almost one year ago (see Adapting to a New Era of Computing). The concept of the Universal Canvas is that users shouldn't be forced to work in discrete individual applications to get their work done. Instead, they should be able to simply call up the functionality they need on demand. Or, as Bill Gates put it at the .Net launch in June last year, "This universal canvas is the idea that you no longer leave the browser. Youre always in the browser, even when youre doing your creativity work." To put it another way, Office XP becomes the browser, and users can access all of the rich function of the collaborative Internet without ever having to leave the Microsoft Office environment. At least, that's the theory. In practice, Microsoft is leaving up to developers how they implement Smart Tags, for instance, giving them a range of options in addition to using the .Net-compliant SOAP standard. While some groups within Microsoft are lobbying hard for a more aggressive push towards the web services model, other more pragmatic voices are holding their ground in favour of moving one step at a time. That's why Office XP can still be implemented, if customers so choose, without any Internet connectivity whatsoever. Microsoft realizes that not all its customers are ready to wire up to .Net just yet. This review of the week's news highlights is by ASPnews.com founder and consulting analyst Phil Wainewright. A comprehensive news digest is published every month in the ASP News Review newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers.