Same message, different Outlook (Credit: Campaign Monitor)
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Some digital publishers are complaining that the new Microsoft Outlook rolls back design standards by half a decade. The 2007 edition of Outlook, the most popular e-mail client for big businesses, ditches Internet Explorer's technology for that of Word 2007 to display HTML messages.

The Document Parts tool can add headers and footers and more.
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The My Day application tracks and color-codes lists.
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Word's Publishing Layout View includes desktop publishing tools.
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Office Art 2.0 uses both Microsoft and Mac graphics abilities.
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Excel 2008's Ledger Sheets are built with home users in mind.
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Windows users are expecting to find the new Microsoft Office 2007 software in stores by the end of this month. But Mac users will have to wait until the second half of the year to get the new Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, which won't look much like their Windows-only counterparts. Microsoft is calling the new set of software Office 2008 for Mac.

As shown in these early screenshots from Microsoft, Office 2008 for Mac lacks the new Ribbon toolbar that's laced throughout Office 2007 for Windows. However, that might be good news for Mac users who don't want to confront a steep learning curve when running the new software.

Among the highlights of Office 2008 for Mac is the new, widgetlike My Day application. It displays a schedule and lets you track and color-code items in a list without requiring Microsoft's Entourage personal information manager.

Word's new Publishing Layout offers basic desktop publishing tools for designing newsletters and business brochures. Microsoft says that Word will better display previews of work in progress. Office 2008's Office Art 2.0 will use the new graphics engine found in Office 2007 as well as Mac's graphics abilities. With household account balancing in mind, Excel's new Ledger Sheets is built to crunch numbers without requiring that you rely on memorized formulas.

Unfortunately, as with the new, Office 2007 file formats, you'll need to take extra steps to open and edit documents between the old and new Mac versions of Office. Tools to allow older Office software to read the new, 2008 files are not expected to become available until a few months after the public release of the software package. Beta tests of the file-conversion download may become available this spring.

Will Apple loyalists buy Microsoft software for their Macs? There are plenty of alternatives to Office. In the meantime, rumors abound that iWork '07 will include a new spreadsheet application, making the package a stronger foil to Microsoft Office.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not announce expected updates to the popular iWork and iLife suites during his Macworld keynote address. Nor did he mention the Leopard operating system.

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The site designer has attractive templates and is easy to use.
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Microsoft supplies a basic, but capable, CRM application.
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We got access to the new version of Office Live today. The service is scheduled to leave the beta phase in mid-November. Office Live is a suite of online applications targeted at the small business; it's not Word and Excel online. A quick look at the product (a full review is forthcoming) leaves a very positive impression.

Office Live is designed to get a small business on to the Web--both publicly, with a Web site, and privately, for collaboration and back-office work.

The service seduces the new user quickly: domain registration is easy, and most importantly, it is free. Microsoft supplies both e-mail and Web site hosting, and the tools to manage both are quite good. The hosted e-mail/calendar application is slick (more like Outlook than Gmail), the site designer is basic but easy to use, and it apes the new look and feel of Microsoft's upcoming Office suite. The service also provides clear statistics, including data on which search terms are landing users at the site. The smallest business could stop right here and be happy with what Microsoft is offering.

There is more to the suite, although additional features are not free. Office Live also has an advertising manager (it places ads on Windows Live search, not on Google, of course). There also are service levels beyond the free Office Live Basics. If you want to sync your e-mail with Outlook, for example, you'll need the Essentials ($20 a month) or the Premium ($40 a month) package. Both give you more storage space and more e-mail accounts. Workspaces, Office Live's wiki tool, is also part of the paid subscriptions. (I think that's a mistake--small businesses aren't going to know what they're missing unless wikis are free. I bet Google's new wiki service will be available for no charge.)

Paid users also get a business contact manager, a basic competitor to Salesforce.com. This module doesn't have the extensibility of Salesforce's service, but it's probably got enough oomph for many small businesses. It's also very clearly organized--beginners won't have to spend much, if any, time in training to begin to use it.

The Premium version has more back-office tools, such as a project management application and a time manager.

There are pieces missing, of course. There's no accounting built into the system, and no inventory management. The Web designer doesn't offer an easy way to put a blog on your site. And Office Live's composition and back-office tools only work in Internet Explorer (many modules download ActiveX components). But even so, Office Live is one of the most important online products I've seen--a very compelling suite of Web services for small business. I'm sure some pieces of the suite are better than others, but a quick look tells me Office Live delivers, for the most part, what it promises: easy-to-use Web publishing, communication, and collaboration features, all at a very reasonable fee.

Related stories:
News: Office Live almost out of the gate
Comparison: Office Live vs. Google Apps for Your Domain
Column: Office Live: The first hit is free

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GigaOm blogger Om Malik is asking the people on his panel, "Office 2.0: Where Are We?" where they are on the Office 2.0 scale. Are they old-school Office 1.0 (PC-based apps) users, or all-online, Office 2.0 gurus?

Ismael Ghalimi, the conference organizer, says he's at Office 1.95. The Web let him down when he had to print conference badges.

Karen Leavitt, of WebEx, who says her company is the 800-pound gorilla of Web 2.0, says she's at Office 1.73.

Mark Suster is CEO of Koral, a content collaboration company. He's at 1.75. And he points out that people around the world work very differently. The way we do things in California is very different from the way workers in Europe, Asia, or Wisconsin do. That's a really important point.

Rajen Sheth, of Google, is trying to bring Google technologies to business. He says he's at 1.9999. That's interesting, since I think Google office apps still have a long way to go. Plus he still uses Outlook. Rajen, if you believe, take the plunge!

Suster points out that, in business, there are big issues associated with adopting Web 2.0 products, since they don't offer companies as much control as they're used to having. This is an ongoing argument, actually--the PC blew up the "glass house" of business computing. Web-based products are just continuing this creative destruction.

Sheth and Malik are big proponents of Web-based tools, since they make globally distributed workgroups effective. Plus, Malik says, when people are not all crammed together in a central office: "No politics."

A very smart aside from Israel: "The killer app is online recruiting." How true, since the next generation of workers is already online in ways that we old fogys are not. The Work 1.0-style resume may be dead.

Me, although I write about Web-based applications all the time, I confess that I'm probably at Office 1.25. I still use Microsoft Word and Outlook, and I store all my files on my local hard disk. I use Web tools for collaboration, and I am eager to move to Office 2.0 apps, but it's hard to break my old habits.

Where are you on the Office 2.0 scale?

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The Approver dashboard tells you which docs need your attention
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For each document, you can see whose approval is still pending
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At the Office 2.0 Conference that starts tomorrow, we're going to see several new Web-based business tools, from big and ambitious office suites to smaller, focused problem solvers, such as Approver. This little service was built to address the typical office frustration of collecting comments and approvals on documents.

Approver sends e-mail messages to the people you need to review your documents and points them to a Web page for each document. Documents can be attached to the online Approver record if you wish, or you can send your recipients URLs pointing to files, or create text in Approver itself. The service will then track who has approved your document by the deadline you set, and it will send reminders to the laggards.

The tool attempts to make simple what is actually a complex social interaction, and some nuance gets left behind--on purpose, it turns out. For example, you can leave as many comments on documents as you want, without actually approving a file, but there's no actual reject option. Approver creator Jeffrey McManus told me he's trying to do a little bit of social engineering and encourage dialogue. That's really swell, but I bet he'll have to add the big red stamp of rejection to the product as more people start asking for it.

I also think the dashboard view of documents pending approval could convey more information. Again, McManus is working on it; he showed me a prototype that looks pretty good (I approved it).

The real thing McManus needs to do, and which he is actively working on, is to make Approver into a platform that works within existing document creation systems, such as Microsoft Office, or Writely, or Zoho. The Approver concept will work best when it's integrated into workflow, not separate from it.

But even today, in its very early stage, Approver is a clear-headed and cost-effective solution to a nagging workflow issue. It's certainly a better tool for tracking the document approval cycle than e-mail, and it's worth trying. The service is free for the first document, $40 a year thereafter.

CNET is a sponsor of the Office 2.0 Conference.

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Work.com's article formatting almost guarantees readability.
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A new small-business advice site, Work.com, launched today. It's a collection of how-to and advice articles, nicely organized and easily searchable. Anybody running their own business will probably find useful tips in it.

Users can also become writers, putting down their experience for others to use. The way the team built the authoring tool is very smart. Recognizing that most entrepreneurs know an awful lot but don't know how to say it, the system walks authors down a path of creating an introduction, then a series of "action steps" with specifics (subtitled, "I recommend..."), and finally a list of resources and related online sources. This structure keeps the articles focused and consistent.

Why contribute? The usual reason: exposure. If I'm a caterer and I write a story about feeding people at business events, I might be able to get some good business from the article.

Users can rate articles, and the highest-rated stories bubble up to the top. The threat of bad user ratings acts as a check against Work.com authors shamelessly pitching their own services.

Work.com is a strong and focused community publishing platform, but while it's pitched as a Web 2.0 service, its use of new online capabilities is not revolutionary. It's not a wiki, for example; users can comment on stories but cannot edit them.

It's worth looking at if you run a small business and have questions about how to do it better. (If you don't have questions, what are you doing running a business in the first place?)

See also the small-business resource, AllBusiness.com, and CNET's own collection of small-business best practices.

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Zoho SSO: all your Zoho logins can now be merged
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The online application company Zoho announced on Friday that has launched a single sign-on (SSO) feature. Now you can integrate all of the Zoho applications that you've signed up for separately into one account. For example, if you signed up for the word processor Zoho Write using your corporate e-mail as your ID and the presentation app Zoho Show on Gmail, you'll now be able to merge all the accounts together and you'll stay signed on as you move from app to app.

This is getting some play in the Web 2.0 blogs. But for the end user, it's not that big a deal, mostly because Zoho doesn't yet collect in one place all the files you create in its separate apps. If you start a file in the spreadsheet app, for instance, it won't show up in the word processor.

File-based organization, as opposed to Zoho's current app-based organization, is coming soon, Zoho architect Raju Vegesna told me. That's good, because that's what users really need. It's what we already have on our PCs and Macs--files separate from applications. The online suite ThinkFree gets it right: your account page shows you everything you've created using the company's suite of applications. Google, though, does not. Writely can't see data created in Google Spreadsheets, and vice versa.

This is one of the issues that I'll be discussing at a panel I'm moderating at the Office 2.0 Conference this week (CNET is sponsoring the event). It promises to be a very interesting conference, and I'll be blogging from there.

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Curiously, a lot of desktop Web design software still doesn't make blogging easy. Instead, many bloggers continue to use the online tools offered by their hosting service to compose and edit entries, which can be a problem with an unstable Internet connection. However, Adobe just released its simple Web publishing app Contribute 4, with new support for blogging at TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress.

The $149 Contribute 4 also integrates with Microsoft Office and Dreamweaver. Site editors can maintain Dreamweaver's user permissions within Contribute 4. Plus, you can drag and drop Flash movies into pages and blog posts designed with Contribute. These changes indicate the deepened integration among tools from Adobe and Macromedia since the companies wed last year. Luckily, Contribute 4 will still work on Windows 2000 in addition to XP and Mac OS 10.3.9.

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The Google Groups beta lets you create a basic shared Web site
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The Web page editor, based on Google Page Creator, is simple
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As with a wiki, you can upload and manage files
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You can locate like-minded people and intriguing events within Google Groups, but until now its interface has been pretty ho-hum. For instance, I tend to rely on Google Groups' messages within my Gmail account and never visit the online arm of the service. But Google is aiming to offer members of Groups an attractive, shared destination on the Web. The new features, which remain in beta testing, let you make a quick multipage Web site in a few steps with the WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface of Google Page Creator. You're no longer stuck with a few predesigned templates. Plus, you can upload your own logo and add a welcome message. You can check out the Google Groups 3 beta at groups-beta.google.com.

Whether you're looking for fellow Liberace fans, planning a fondue party, or setting up a business meeting, those blanket e-mail messages your group shares can now point to common pages and personal profiles. The uncluttered interface of the Google Groups 3 beta lets you manage discussions, files, and members with a minimal number of mouse clicks. This service has some of the features of a wiki, à la JotSpot, but without the wiki label that may stump newbies.

You can chat from the group page or within Gmail and upload files to the group site. To show your face, just upload a picture and bio to your own profile. And of course, Google's search engine can dig up stuff within your group or any other public groups. There are some low-key text ads within the interface, no big deal. While Google Groups isn't yet a finished product, we'd like to be able to tag our files and discussions the way Gmail allows. And so far, we don't see a way to incorporate databases or events the way Yahoo Groups allows.

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Prints from HP's lasers promise to be sharper than this photo
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When shopping for a new printer, odds are two names are at the top of your list: Canon and HP. We've covered a bunch of Canon printers and all-in-ones recently, and we will soon be able to even out our printer coverage with reviews from HP's new laser lineup, which the company unveiled yesterday. It includes seven new all-in-ones and two printers.

In addition to five monochrome-only LaserJet all-in-ones that target large enterprises with prices that range from $1,499 to $3,999 and print speeds that range from 27ppm to 35ppm, there are two all-in-ones that are slower and cheaper and give you the option for color prints:

HP Color LaserJet CM1015 MFP
$499; 8ppm for both color and monochrome
HP Color LaserJet CM1017 MFP
$699; same speed as above, but it's networkable and can hold additional memory

The two printers announced yesterday boast impressive print speeds for businesses with high-volume printing needs:

HP LaserJet P3005
$549; 35ppm monochrome only
HP Color LaserJet CP4005n
$1,299; 25ppm for color and 30ppm for monochrome

HP says the P3005 is available now and the CP4005n will start shipping on November 1. The others will ship in either late November or December.

Looking forward to next year, HP announced that some of its high-end business printers will begin using the company's Egdeline printing technology, which it introduced in in-store retail photo-printing kiosks last spring. With Edgeline, a printer is constructed so that the printheads stretch across a whole page so that they don't need to move. The paper moves, but the printheads remain stationary, and prints can be completed in just one or two passes. According to an HP VP, it's four times faster than any HP printer on the market today, and because the printheads are motionless, you'll get more accurate ink placement and better image quality.

Source: PC Magazine

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