Working Together with Microsoft Office XP

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If you're happy with the word processing and e-mail tools you use now, you might have greeting the arrival of Microsoft Office XP with a yawn and a "ho-hum," After all, there aren't any breaking word processing technologies you need to keep up with. Spreadsheets don't change radically from year to year.

And yet Office XP offers a variety of compelling, time-saving reasons to upgrade, especially for teams. The slew of document management and collaboration tools that it contains promise to make your daily tasks a lot easier.

Multiple review process

One of our favorite XP time-savers is the automated multiple review process. Previously, collecting comments and revisions from a team could be a tedious experience, since you'd need to send out individual copies of the original document, then combine everyone's edits by hand. But with the new multiple review process, you can automatically route a Word, Excel, or Power Point document to a group of people in a specific order, then view everyone's changes merged into a single document at the end.

When you're ready to send a document, go to the File pulldown menu and select Send To, and then Routing Recipient. Type in the intended recipients, the hit Route when you're done. As each person finishes with the document, they'll select File/Send To/Next Routing Recipient to move it along.

After the document has gone full circle, the edits will be color-coded by writer. You can view the changes individually by user or all at once. You also have the option of accepting or rejecting any particular edit.

End calendar confusion

Office XP also smoothes over calendar difficulties in Outlook, making it a great way to manage group scheduling. In the past, you might well have ignored making group calendars in Outlook, since it seemed too great a hassle for the payoff. But updated tools in XP make it much more useful.

Outlook already had a way to send out group invitations for a meeting, but the options for the receiver were limited. Once you got an invite, you could only accept or reject it. If the time didn't work for you and you wanted to suggest a new time, you had to reject the invitation, then create one of your own. If the situation got too complicated, you'd usually end up picking up the phone and making a meeting time the old-fashioned way.

But with Office XP, you can automatically suggest a better time when you get a meeting invitation. This makes the process a lot more streamlined.

Also with Office XP's Outlook calendar, managers can create a group schedule where all of a team's appointments are merged, showing what times remain open.

If you set tasks and reminders in your calendar, you're probably used to coming back from vacation and finding that you need to click through a hundred reminders before you can finally view your calendar. It's enough to give you a repetitive strain injury on your index finger. Office XP finally fixes that irritating problem: all reminders are grouped in a single unified window.

Introducing SharePoint

If it looks like Microsoft's SharePoint Team Services is trying to steal your job -- creating and managing project intranets -- don't worry, it's only going to make your life easier by allowing work teams to create simple intranets that require less IT support. SharePoint is a set of Web extensions that build the Office 2000 Server Extensions, creating an out-of-the-box way for cross-department teams to quickly create intranets or extranets with little programming experience. An administrator can create a password-protected site that allows for file sharing and discussions and is navigable through any browser. Users can save to a SharePoint site directly from their Office XP applications. And if they're waiting on changes in a centrally-stored document, they can ask to be automatically notified when that document is updated.

To create a SharePoint site, you'll need Office XP Developer or Professional Special Edition. Besides hosting it on a company Web server, it can also be hosted on nine sites with agreements with Microsoft, including myhosting.com, ValueWeb, and of course, Microsoft bCentral. For more information on creating a SharePoint site, look to this Microsoft resource page.

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