The software, code-named Office 10, includes a feature called smart tags, which appear as icons embedded in documents, Microsoft said. Click on an icon, and a drop-down menu appears, listing options for further actions. Some smart tags will be standard with Office, while others can be written by independent software vendors or corporate IT staff. They can be used to connect Office documents with information in other applications or data sitting somewhere on the Internet. Smart tags will help Office move beyond being a personal productivity suite and become a platform to provide access to all the information on a corporate network and the Internet, said Dwight Davis, an analyst with Summit Strategies.
Some users are cautious.
Microsoft Office is a good personal-productivity tool but may not be the best choice as an enterprise collaboration tool, said John Sisti, CIO of semiconductor distributor Memec. For one thing, Microsoft has a history of failing to be adequately backward-compatible. If past is prologue, it will be difficult to move applications to future versions of Office after 10. It is also unclear at this point whether Office 10 is the best bet to be used throughout the entire corporation. It's getting better, but there still are all kinds of gaps there.