SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Microsoft has had a difficult time explaining the subtle differences between Office 2002 and 2003, giving little reason for customers to upgrade. But the new collaboration tools built in to office are quite compelling, and offer far more ways for workers and their managers to communicate while producing documents.

New for this edition of Office is Microsoft Water Cooler 2003, which captures informal non-business related information from multiple employees and randomly distributes it to others based on a “cool or not” factor associated with each user account.

My favorite feature is “Digital Crumple”, which allows a manager to review a document and decide to crumple it up and throw it at the author with a simple click of a button. The next time the reader checks their e-mail in Outlook, the document appears, seems to crumple, and then explodes on screen while being deleted from the user’s hard disk or network share.

The tools aren’t all top down: The “Digital Urine” feature allows employees to secretly markup e-mail from their bosses in ways that other employees of their access level and below will clearly see, but which remain hidden from anyone with a higher security clearance.