Another year, and another version of Microsoft's Office application suite. Office System 2003, due to be released on 21 October, is the latest repackaging and upgrade to the suite of products that accounts for more than 90 per cent of its market.

The software giant has continued to refine Office through bug fixes, and small new features aimed at improving usability. It has also added a number of heavyweight applications aimed at enterprise environments to solidify its place with fickle and cost-conscious corporate buyers.

As well as the usual grouping of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook, Microsoft is including SharePoint, its team working and collaboration tool, and InfoPath, a new application for designing and executing dynamic electronic forms and data input templates.

"We are trying to move Office away from being simply document-centric," explained Neil Laver, product marketing manager for Microsoft UK.

"As well as developing the core applications, we wanted to build a platform that could be used for enabling business processes."

Users of Tablet PCs are also catered for, with the release of OneNote, an unstructured electronic doodle pad.

Also usable on conventional PCs and laptops, users can type, draw (and, in the case of Tablet users, freehand write and sketch) on a blank canvas without the restriction of word processor formatting.

"OneNote recognises that many people work in a way that traditional note-taking applications do not address," said Laver.

Deployment of Office in organisations already using the previous XP release might prove difficult to justify, as there is little change to the core applications.

According to Laver, early adoption from upgrades is likely to come from corporate users running Office 2000 and 97, who are already looking at a complete software and hardware replacement plan.

"We refresh our software platforms every three or four years, and until recently we had been running Office 2000 on PCs with Windows XP as their operating system," said Luke Rutherford, IT manager at Northumberland College.

"The college started looking at a new version of Office a few months ago, and decided to wait for Office System 2003, rather than buy Office XP."

As a result, Northumberland College became involved with Microsoft's Rapid Adoption Programme, and is deploying Office 2003 to 800 PCs across the organisation.

The decision to adopt the release was mainly down to the Smart Docs technology, according to Rutherford. The college produces many documents and reports for assessment procedures, and has to gather data from multiple sources.

Using Smart Docs, staff can link data from the web, databases and other documents into a single view, ensuring that everyone who views and changes a document has access to the most up-to-date versions of the external data sources, as well as reducing file sizes and the time to collate information.

"The time it takes to gather data for an assessment report has been cut from two and a half days to one, and we've seen a 250 per cent increase in productivity among users," claimed Rutherford.

In a clear response to rival Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, Microsoft has finally delivered on one of the biggest omissions from the previous Office XP release - the adoption of the complete XML scripting and development language.

Already at the centre of StarOffice, XML is now treated as a native file format, allowing for easier use and manipulation of XML data sources, and improving data interoperability between applications and platforms.

The shift to XML will open up the platform as a base for bespoke application development.

"Office has usually been about email, word processing and creating the odd PowerPoint presentation," said Jeremy Roche, chief executive at financial software developer Coda.

His company is one of the launch partners developing XML-based applications that sit on top of the new Office applications.

Coda has created Collaborative Close to simplify and speed up the process of closing and balancing company books every financial period.

"We sit on top of the core Office applications, and in particular make use of SharePoint for its collaborative working features, InfoPath for its online forms and date capturing features, and tie it all together and integrate it with other systems using XML," said Roche.

Coda is also using web services for online integration of their Office-based application.

"XML is critical. We now have a proper XML implementation in the Office products, and developing our products in pure XML ensures that development time is kept to a minimum, and that code can be imported and exported to other platforms," he explained.

Northumberland College, however, has retained Novell's Groupwise mail client over the new version of Outlook.

"We don't use Outlook," said Rutherford. "We wanted to deploy it, but had problems running it in conjunction with our Groupwise server. It worked, but was not 100 per cent compatible.

"We took this to Microsoft, but didn't get much of a reaction on how to solve it, so we decided not to deploy it for mail use."

Microsoft continues to dominate the office application market, but the likes of Corel, IBM and, in particular, Sun are providing viable competition on an application basis.

If Microsoft is to fend off this competition, the move to a platform model will be crucial in the coming years as companies look more to bespoke applications tailored to specific business needs.

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