Office 2003 Beta 2 TR

Microsoft restored the limited Office 2003 Beta 2 Technical Refresh downloads around Noon on Sunday. Because I had queued up the downloads in Microsoft’s download manager software before Friday’s outage, I was fortunate enough to grab the updates on Saturday.

First impressions:

*Microsoft has made many spit-and-polish changes to Office 2003. New icons represent Office applications, and icons are refined in the toolbars. Some of the changes extend beyond Office. The installation also updates the look of some Internet Explorer icons, too.

*Stability is greatly improved, particularly for crash-prone Outlook. Crashes are not unusual in beta software, but the update seems to have eliminated ongoing problems I have had with Outlook. Microsoft also fine-tuned Outlook’s Junk E-Mail filter, which now is surprisingly adept at separating wanted from unwanted mail. In a nice touch, the user now can empty the Junk E-Mail folder from the right-click menu much the same way as the Deleted folder.

*Responsiveness is greatly improved. Applications load much faster, too. On one test machine, for example, PowerPoint opens in about 1.5 seconds versus more than 4 seconds before.

Overall, the Technical Refresh is much closer to a finished product than its predecessor. Microsoft has made no official statement on availability, although executives have said the product is expected to release to manufacturing sometime this summer.

To get there, Microsoft needs to put the Technical Resfresh in the hands of the larger group of 600,000 testers, not just the 15,000 that are testing the update-by-download-delivery method. On Friday, the company said that a decision would be made within 10 days whether to offer only the download or also make CDs available.

Posted by Joe Wilcox at June 23, 2003 08:04 AM