Although the next version of Microsoft's business suite is not expected to ship until the second half of 2003, a beta version has already been released to testers.

While the new features and enhancements of the beta aren't set in stone, experience has shown that there are rarely major changes in the final product, so most of what we see here is likely to be what we get.

The most important change is that if you're running anything other than Windows XP or 2000 SP3 and have no plans to upgrade, then read no further. Office 11 will not run on any earlier versions of Windows.

As ever, Microsoft is concentrating on keeping the corporate users happy; these, after all, account for the vast majority of sales. So the enhancements that Microsoft is pushing the hardest are data integration and collaboration.

We first saw XML in Office 2000, and basically it's a public standard extension of HTML. Whereas HTML concerns itself with layout, XML concerns itself with storing data that can then be used by different systems.

For example, if a document is written in XML, it can then just as easily be displayed as a web page or a printed page. Just as HTML has tags to describe formatting, XML has tags that describe meaning, and they can be defined by the author, rather like database fields.

Excel, Access and Word now have a XML Task Pane, into which an XML schema can be loaded. A schema isn't only a library of tags, it's also a set of rules as to how they relate. For example, you could create a 'price' tag and stipulate that it must contain a 'VAT' tag and a 'shipping' tag and that all three tags must be in currency format.

The other new enterprise feature is Sharepoint Team Services. This requires a 'back-end' of .Net Server, Internet Information Services and SQL Server.

This, according to Microsoft, allows enterprises "to deploy, manage and secure their collaborative workspace service environments".

So what does that mean in practice? The buzz-phrase here is collaborative document authoring.

The Shared Workspace Task Pane seen in Excel and Word brings together all the resources needed for collaborative authoring.

Team members can update their locally stored version of a document, contact other team members, set tasks for other team members and schedule meetings - all from the same tabbed task pane.

The documentation accompanying the beta discs claims that Instant Messaging is now integrated suite-wide. For example, you can send an instant message from a name Smart Tag without having to go through a separate program. We were unable, however, to find this facility in the beta.

So, what's new for the rest of us? The flat minimalist nineties look of the last few versions has been given a makeover, with convex Windows XP-style toolbar buttons that glow a cheery orange when pressed.

Fans of the Office Assistant will be delighted to know that Clippit and company are still available; the rest of us will be relieved to know that this is turned off by default.

Our beta copy included voice recognition, which worked after a fashion, although it wasn't possible to train it to a sufficiently high standard in the time available.

It's possible to mix typing and dictation, but having the microphone 'listening' did seem to slow down keyboard response.

Whether the dictation feature will make it into the UK version is not clear; a message saying that our UK keyboard layout wouldn't allow dictation (although it did) suggests that, as in Office XP, this feature may not be available to speakers of the Queen's English.

Simplified Word
Most of the enhancements have gone into Word and Outlook. Word has a new viewing mode to add to the normal, outline, web and print layout views.

Press the 'Start Reading' button and you'll be taken to a simplified interface with enlarged text on paper-like pages. We didn't find it offered much in the way of improved legibility on a desktop machine, but it would make sense on a tablet PC.

In the beta it seems a little buggy: the menu bar tends to leap around the screen in an unpredictable manner. Tablet users can also benefit from being able to pen remarks in a comment balloon.

In common with the other Office programs, there's a new task pane known as the Research Pane. On the surface this is a rather good idea: it offers one-stop shopping for a variety of local and online information sources.

You can access the local thesaurus and dictionary; translate words offline or online depending on the language; and consult the Encarta World Dictionary, MSN Search, US Encarta Encyclopedia and Stock Quotes online.

We found that the response was rather erratic, with frequent 'no response' messages, but a Stock Quote lookup did offer a consolation prize in suggesting 'misfit' for MSFT.

Although there appears to be a mechanism for adding other sources, we couldn't get this to work. When it's all working, there can be a huge amount of information crammed into the pane, and it's fiddly to navigate.

It would benefit from having a tabbed interface like the Shared Workspace. Although you can select the sources you want to consult, this again is irksome when you want a quick hit.

Most people will probably prefer to switch to a browser manually and consult services such as Google or Babel Fish, both of which outperform the respective Microsoft contenders thoroughly.

A small improvement in Word is that it's now possible to tile documents side-by-side in the same parent window with a single command, something we've been waiting for since version one and which Excel users have had for years.

Our other big grouse with Word is the file search: specifying a folder in which to search is still a tedious business, involving tunnelling and scrolling through the entire disk structure.

It would be a vast improvement to have a most-frequently used or most-recently used list in this.