Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Office Professional 2003

Office SystemMicrosoft Office Professional Edition 2003 provides tools and technologies to help IT managers more easily deploy, administer and maintain Office technologies, even while empowering employees do their jobs more effectively. Here are the top 10 reasons to use Office Professional 2003 in your organization.

  1. Empower employees to make smart and timely decisions. Enable employees to exchange and use data from a variety of different sources such as line-of-business applications, corporate portals, or partner systems with the support for industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) in Office Professional 2003 programs. Better information access and the ability for employees to incorporate that information into their workflow empowers employees and helps them make more accurate and timely decisions.
  2. Help protect company information. Information rights management (IRM) functionality is a new policy enforcement technology in Office 2003 Editions that helps protect sensitive files and e-mail messages from unauthorized access and use. With IRM, employees can even set expiration dates on files.
  3. Enable employees to manage and act on the increasing volume of business information. Improvements in the design, layout, and features of Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 can help employees better organize, find, and prioritize their business communications. In addition, the new Research Library available in some Office Professional 2003 programs allows employees to research, find, and incorporate information from reference materials into their files. Employees can access reference materials ranging from corporate information sources to online research sites to dictionaries and thesauruses.
  4. Increase the capture and use of corporate information. XML support in Office Professional 2003 enables companies to develop solutions that standardize the creation and collection of information that would otherwise reside in binary files on computers and file shares. Businesses can help reduce the duplication of data and work that exists in many organizations today while improving the value of corporate information.
  5. Help company groups take full advantage of line-of-business applications. With support for XML, Office Professional 2003 enables employees to access and analyze information from a variety of business systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, or other line-of-business applications all from within the familiar tools they use today. Employees can increase efficiency and productivity while taking advantage of existing investments.
  6. Improve performance and user connectivity to e-mail. Outlook 2003 includes a new cached mode to increase reliability of connections, and improve performance and user productivity. The new Outlook 2003 cached mode helps increase the reliability and performance of connections, as well as employee productivity. The cached mode in Outlook 2003 downloads all necessary information to an employee’s computer as it comes in so they’re not affected by network performance issues.

    With Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, employees can also access their Exchange server directly over the Internet. If employees can browse the Web, they can access their Exchange mailbox. Once the feature is operational, Outlook 2003 can automatically connect to the Exchange server over the Internet when a direct connection to the Exchange server is unavailable. IT managers can eliminate the need to have corporate virtual private network (VPN) servers set up for e-mail access. Synchronous point processing is also available during cache mode synchronization. If the connection is dropped and then reestablished, the synchronization resumes where it left off instead of starting over. Employees can then have a seamless connectivity experience.

    Note Caching requires Exchange Server 2003.

  7. Support effective teaming internally and with partners. Shared Workspaces created from within programs in Office 2003 Editions and based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services can help improve teaming, partnering, and project visibility, and allow virtual teams to work together in real time. Employees can complete projects faster and reduce the confusion inherent in multi-participant projects and processes. Employees can see when team members are online, communicate with them in real time, and publish important task lists and files to a team Web site.
  8. Create customized solutions. Support for XML in Office Professional 2003 enables developers to build customized and industry-specific document solutions or smart documents that can help streamline processes and improve productivity without significant employee training or downtime. With smart document solutions for generating proposals, for example, sales teams can streamline processes and improve efficiency and capture of data.
  9. Help increase security and privacy. Office Professional 2003 provides several methods including digital certificates and signatures, data protection and recovery, and other application-specific features to help manage program and document security. Increased security measures in Outlook 2003 such as the blocking of incoming messages that may contain viruses, HTML image blocking to prevent address validation, and improved rules to manage junk e-mail messages can reduce the time employees spend managing e-mail.
  10. Simplify upgrades, administration, and support. Deploy Office Professional 2003 across your organization with minimum disruption of work to employees. Improve the distribution of Office Professional 2003 to employees with low bandwidth connections by allowing them to copy a compressed installation source locally and then install it from there, rather than installing from a CD or network share. Employees also won’t need to reboot after installation. Consistent file formats in Office Professional Edition 2003 can help employees share documents with users who have not upgraded yet.

    Microsoft Office Online the companion Web site for products in the Microsoft Office System can also reduce the time IT Professionals spend supporting and giving assistance. It provides help and support to employees and IT managers to increase productivity and get maximum impact from Office Professional 2003 and other Microsoft Office System products.

Office Professional 2003 is the cornerstone of the Microsoft Office System, and works seamlessly with the other servers, services, and desktop programs in the Microsoft Office System to help address a broad array of business problems.