Internet publishing highlights new Microsoft and Lotus suites

By Richard Morochove

First published May 14, 1998

Net, Net and even more Net. That neatly summarizes the most important new features in software suites from Microsoft and Lotus, due out later this year. Both suites make it easier to publish and view documents on the Web. Suite software from each developer includes spreadsheet, word processing, graphics and other applications.

There are three main areas improved in Microsoft's upcoming suite, code-named Office 9: Web-based productivity, administration and the intelligence of the software applications.

Microsoft is moving to make the Web's HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) a companion file format. The goal is to allow you to save Office data files as HTML, while preserving formatting and other features. This will be done using XML, which allows additional capabilities to be easily added to standard HTML.

Why the move to the Web standard? Microsoft wants to make it easy to publish Office documents to the Web or to other networks that make use of the same technology, such as private business Intranets. The goal is to allow anyone with a recent Web browser to read documents created in Office and view them with all the original formatting.

A new feature will allow Web users to use a browser to add comments and suggest revisions to Web-based documents. You'll be able to attach these comments to each paragraph or so of the document. The original document need not be created in Office. You can even add comments on your site to a page that's hosted on another Web site.

In effect, Office 9 will create a two-way Web, with threaded comments and discussions possible for any Web page. You'll be able to subscribe to discussion groups and receive notification of new postings. It's clear that Microsoft is taking aim at Lotus Notes, which allows similar collaborative capabilities.

Microsoft will also provide real-time collaboration tools that allow document conferencing and the broadcasting of presentations.

Office will be easier to administer, since today's 36 different language versions will be condensed to one single version, with plug-ins for different languages.

Office 9 applications will also become more intelligent. If you now "cut and paste" from other documents, you'll appreciate the new "collect and paste" capability which lets you retrieve information from a number of documents at once, while preserving the original formatting.

The Office 9 applications menus will adapt to your usage, arranging the program features you use more frequently to a more prominent position on the menus. Applications will be self-repairing, so you won't need to re-install the entire program if you inadvertently delete a critical file.

Microsoft says it plans to ship Office 9 before the end of this year.

You needn't wait that long to get some of these new capabilities. IBM's Lotus Development plans to ship the next version of Lotus SmartSuite, dubbed Millennium Edition, in June.

SmartSuite also features improved integration with the Internet, although it's implemented differently from Microsoft's methods.

SmartSuite Millennium features Lotus FastSite, a new Internet publishing tool that makes it easier for non-technical users to publish information to a Web site. FastSite automatically converts SmartSuite or Microsoft Office documents to Web formats. It uses XML-enhanced HTML, so you can easily exchange documents with Lotus eSuite, the collection of Java applets that includes the most-used functions of SmartSuite.

Web developers can use the eSuite DevPack to integrate eSuite with their Web pages. Web visitors can then access the Web-based documents without requiring either Lotus eSuite or SmartSuite.

Microsoft, on the other hand, requires that Web users own Office 9 in order to fully access Office documents on the Web.

Since Microsoft Office has the lion's share of the suite software market, the company obviously doesn't feel the need to accommodate users of competing software. So if Webmasters want to create interactive Web pages that can be accessed by more users, they'd be better off using the Lotus software.

SmartSuite Millennium can also save documents in the high-fidelity Java-based jDoc format. A jDoc viewer automatically downloads from the Web page along with the document, so that any Java-based browser can view it as the originator intended.

SmartSuite comes with IBM's ViaVoice Gold speech dictation and command software. ViaVoice can be used with both the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and Word Pro. It will allow you to complete a 1-2-3 expense report spreadsheet by using speech to enter your expense data.

In addition to the Internet and speech recognition improvements, the SmartSuite applications include a number of new capabilities.

1-2-3 features the most extensive enhancements, including more than fifty new analytic functions, bigger spreadsheets with up to 65,536 rows, more SmartLabels that recognize more than a dozen functions by English-language names and faster performance.

The new version of Lotus Organizer will let you easily exchange and update calendars and address information with 3Com's Palm III organizer and handheld PCs. CW