Office 2000: Worth the Bother?

Teamwork Tools

Good Idea, Bad Execution

Workgroup software can be like dental floss: Everyone agrees it's a good idea, but few bother to use it. In theory, adding workgroup tools to the familiar office suite could help. But though some new Office 2000 features can help you and coworkers collaborate productively, we found others too clunky to promote true teamwork.

Intranets can be a teamwork tool, and now that Office sports improved features for creating and publishing Web pages, the suite can serve as an intranet-in-a-box. Converting Word and Excel documents into Web pages is a nearly transparent process; when it's time to update them, you can simply open the HTML files directly from the intranet's Web server, make changes, and save them. Office 2000 automatically provides your intranet with a start page, browsable document directories, and a search engine--all usable in both Internet Explorer and Navigator.

Team Leader Needed

But don't fire your networking guru just yet. Though Office's Web tools can remove the hassle from day-to-day intranet maintenance, initial setup of a Web server is still best left to an expert. Neither does Office provide a way to restrict access to certain sections of the intranet (say, employee compensation files), or let some users view documents but not change them. Office includes two other major Web-based collaboration tools: discussions and subscriptions. The former, threaded message boards that appear within shared Office documents, serve as an alternative to revision marking and comments. You can participate in a document's discussions in either the originating application or a Web browser, but the document must be stored on the network--the message thread disappears if you put it on a floppy or a non-networked laptop or if you send it by e-mail. Subscriptions let you sign on to a discussion, document, or folder on an Office intranet; once signed on, you get immediate, daily, or weekly alerts when anything changes.

Not on the Same Page

But design flaws make these tools hard to use. Just determining that discussions are happening is a challenge, since you can't tell whether they're active unless the discussion toolbar is open. And you can't alert appropriate coworkers that you've initiated a discussion; they'll have to open the document themselves and then subscribe to it. Office e-mails its subscription notifications in HTML format, so users with text-only e-mail will have to fire up a browser to read them. Once opened, notifications refer to most documents not by their file names but by using the entry from Office's little-used Title field; unless everybody involved enters Titles scrupulously, Word fills in the field with the first few words of the document, and as a result you could have trouble telling what document you're being notified about.

Tools that make teamwork tough are the last thing you need.

Harry McCrackenHarry McCracken is a PC World senior writer, John Walkenbach is a contributing editor, and Paul Heltzel and Celeste Robinson are frequent contributors. Testing performed by Robert James of the PC World Test Center.