Enterprise Applications: Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview Proves Difficult With Touch-Screens
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Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview and the accompanying Office 365 subscription-based service is gearing up to operate on both traditional, thick-client PCs and mobile, touch-enabled devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Revamped versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint will all get the bleached, stark Metro interface that is also used in the Windows 8 preview release. Putting Office 2013 content-creation tools on a tablet or even smaller smartphone display proved to be a challenge. eWEEK Labs tests showed that using Office 2013 with only one hand while holding on to a tablet (or slate, as Microsoft insists on calling keyboard-less devices) proved to be a real slow down. IT managers who see an Office 2013 implementation on the horizon should put a couple of items on their agenda. First, become familiar with the new Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy elements that will control what social media data can be pulled into Outlook 2013. And IT developers should start thinking about ways to use people, task, location and calendar information in applets that can be hooked into Office 2013 to enable high-value workers to be even more productive in the Office 2013 suite.
Word 2012 Adds Alignment
Word 2013 gains the ability to align objects like pictures (akin to later versions of Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint), giving documents a more professional appearance without taking a lot of time. This allows elements to appear in the document with a more professional appearance. Notice the green reference line that I'm using to center the red block in my document.
Cameron Sturdevant is the executive editor of Enterprise Networking Planet. Prior to ENP, Cameron was technical analyst at PCWeek Labs, starting in 1997. Cameron finished up as the eWEEK Labs Technical Director in 2012. Before his extensive labs tenure Cameron paid his IT dues working in technical support and sales engineering at a software publishing firm . Cameron also spent two years with a database development firm, integrating applications with mainframe legacy programs. Cameron's areas of expertise include virtual and physical IT infrastructure, cloud computing, enterprise networking and mobility. In addition to reviews, Cameron has covered monolithic enterprise management systems throughout their lifecycles, providing the eWEEK reader with all-important history and context. Cameron takes special care in cultivating his IT manager contacts, to ensure that his analysis is grounded in real-world concern. Follow Cameron on Twitter at csturdevant, or reach him by email at cameron.sturdevant@quinstreet.com.
