Key Customers And Partners Praise Office XP

Microsoft Office XP Released To Manufacturing With Widespread Industry Support
Key Customers And Partners Praise Office XP

AUCKLAND, New Zealand - Tuesday, March 6, 2001 - Microsoft today announced that Office XP, the new version of the world's leading Office software, has been released to manufacturing and will be available in retail later this autumn. The company has completed its extensive development and test efforts for Office XP, which is the most significant version of Office ever released. Major customers, partners and developers, are lining up in support of Office XP, which will deliver exciting new experiences for all types of customers, whether they are at home or in the enterprise. These experiences simplify productivity, enable collaboration for everyone, and provide flexible ways to solve business needs.

"Office XP's greatest strength is that it delivers extensive new innovations that will truly improve the way people work by enabling them to be more efficient and productive with their PC," said Bridget Reeves, Business Productivity Marketing Manager at Microsoft New Zealand. "We worked with a wide range of customers to shape this product and we are excited to see that customer response has been very positive about Office XP."

Customer Evaluation Picks Up Speed
Over 500,000 corporate customers have the opportunity to evaluate Office XP's corporate preview release over the coming months and many have already expressed excitement about Office XP. Customers are very interested in the new productivity and collaboration capabilities, which will enable them to work more effectively and communicate better with others.

Customers are also pleased with features in Office XP that enable them to tightly integrate Office XP with information from the Web and other applications, including SharePoint Portal Server, the flexible portal solution from Microsoft that allows companies to easily find, share and publish information.

Industry analysts are also supportive of the new technologies in Office XP and believe it is a substantial upgrade over Office 2000.

Broad Industry Support for Office XP
With Office XP retail availability now just a few months away, solution providers and developers are also rallying around the new desktop productivity solution. Hundreds of Microsoft Certified Solution Providers (MCSPs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are already building Office XP solutions. Office XP's support of new standards-based technology enables developers and solution providers to build a broad set of business solutions on the Office platform.

"As an ISV we're really excited about the Smart Tag technology. It's opened the way for us to truly achieve the vision for the second release of our product ActiveDocs(tm). With our new ActiveDocs Smart Tags users have instant access to an infinite array of external data sources simply by typing a keyword, not having to search through files or connect to databases," said Dot Johnstone, director of Keylogix International Ltd. "We're 'doing the thinking for the user', and that can only make creating documents simpler than ever before - and that's just what our customer's want."

By leveraging the new technologies in Office XP, partners can help their customers reduce development and deployment costs, training and expense costs, and quickly create and deploy custom solutions.

Office XP pricing, technology guarantee, system requirements and availability details will be announced at a later date.

About Office XP
Office XP presents people with the tools needed to work smarter. Office XP greatly improves personal productivity through simplifying the way people work and providing tools that people can rely on; enables collaboration by making it easy to collaborate on documents and work more effectively with others; and extends Office beyond the desktop by enabling people to integrate additional services into Office and easily access information any time. Office XP will be broadly available in the first half of 2001.

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software - any time, any place and on any device.

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