Too Early

John has posted some great pictures from our little adventure yesterday.

Office XP was interesting, it has a lot of the usual feature bloat, but Microsoft finally caught on to a few things about Office 2000 that annoyed people.  The paperclip guy isn't turned on by default now, you can use the group scheduling functions of Outlook, even if you don' t have an Exchange server, and it's much easier to format and perform a lot of the common tasks in Word.

In my opinion, UserLand should be scared of Microsoft's SharePoint server product.  It's everything Manila & My Userland On The Desktop could be, all ready for the masses.  Microsoft has something called "web parts" which allows you to create your own little applets for web pages, that retrieve news, stock quotes, etc. from other sites via JavaScript, VBScript, or even using XML.  They demoed it by retrieving headlines and stock quotes from other services, and said there will be several hundred pre-built web parts available at launch.

Sorry Dave, no RSS in there... 

The web integration looks pretty cool, but I'll have to use it in person before I can judge its true utility.

The "smart tags" in Office XP are a feature that I'll have to get used to.  The amateurish comedian demo guy showed us how you could start typing someone's first and last names in Word, at the beginning of a letter.  Word would scan your Contact List, and if it found the name, you could simply right click on it, and choose to insert the person's mailing address, saving you the hassle of typing it. It's a neat feature, but only for those who use Outlook.

If nothing else, I learned a lot more about transferring a NT domain into Windows 2000 ActiveDirectory, and had a good lunch at the Machine Shed...