Carl Tyler's Blog

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"This Office suite can do more for productivity improvement than any other product in the world," he said, adding that the next frontier was being driven by this new release, which was driven by people working together, sharing information and collaborating.

Bill Gates - Office 2003 Launch

Just lately reading the press, it's felt for me very much like deja vu land. Reading the press you'd think Office 2003 and its collaborative features, were somehow radically new, but to those who have been around reading much of the Microsoft Literature is a great deal like reading the Lotus literature from circa 1996, with the Lotus Team Computing strategy, or as many remember it the 3 C's Communication, Collaboration and Coordination. With a quick search on google for Lotus and Team Computing, you can find a few articles that discuss many features, that SmartSuite 96 had, that Office 2003 now 7+ years later is adding.

"Although Microsoft's 32-bit version of Office was the first integrated business suite to ship for Windows 95, Lotus's SmartSuite 96 , which is now available, leapfrogs the competition with impressive team-computing capabilities."

"In general, users liked the suite's workgroup-collaboration features."

"1. Team-review capabilities. Users like team-computing features that allow you to share documents and gather comments in an automated process. For example, in Word Pro, you can assign editing rights for specific people, as well as markup options for each reviewer. When you get back all the different edits and consolidate them into one file, you can quickly see who made which edit.

2. Tight integration of 1-2-3 with Lotus Notes. Most of the SmartSuite beta testers use Notes, including some users who were evaluating the beta version of Notes 4.0, which was slated to ship in January. Users mentioned they like other applications' (e.g., the Approach database) tight links to Notes, but 1-2-3 was mentioned the most. For example, one company that raises investment funds uses 1-2-3 as a front end to a Notes database. Data is first entered in 1-2-3, where employees can do instant what-if analysis and then route the data throughout the company in Notes.

3. Tight integration of Approach with Lotus Notes. This integration enables Approach users to generate mailing labels and reports that are based on Notes data, among other things.

4. Remote presentations using Team Show in Freelance. Many users commented that it's getting harder to gather many people at one time for a group presentation. Freelance allows you to give a presentation to other users over a network. It also allows you to save a presentation as a self-running presentation, send it over E-mail, and then let the audience members review it at their leisure.

5. Tight integration with E-mail. You can access E-mail menus for engines such as cc:Mail or Notes Mail from within a SmartSuite application. You can route a message through a sequence of people using Team Mail, which provides a mechanism for basic work-flow applications without requiring Notes.

6. Tight integration among SmartSuite applications. For example, if you want to create a mailing label in 1-2-3, you are automatically brought into Approach.

7. Support for the Internet. Users liked the ability to open up a document in Word Pro over the Internet, as well as Freelance's ability to allow you to convert a presentation into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format for display on the World Wide Web.

8. Support for Notes F/X 2.0. Notes Field Exchange lets you send information from applications into Notes and vice versa. Notes F/X 2.0 allows users to access Notes action menus from within SmartSuite applications, providing a more seamless integration with Notes than previous versions of Notes F/X. "

Dave Andrews - Byte Magazine March 1996

I have somewhere on a zip disk a white paper from 1995, maybe 1994 that outlines the Lotus TeamComputing strategy, I will have to see if I can find it, as it was interesting reading then, and I imagine now it is even more interesting...