IBM has quietly put its Profs Professional Office System and DisOSS Distributed Office Support System onto a care-and maintenance basis, and is working on a replacement product called Office that will be common to all Systems Application Architecture machines – 3090, 4381, 9370, AS/400 and PS/2. And if anyone wants to know what Office will look like, well the first version is already available, AS/400 Office being part of the AS/400 announcement in June. Computer Weekly quotes Fred Fassman, IBM’s division director, systems planning in the System Products Division at White Plains, New York as saying that development of Office has been under way for two years, and that it will have a common repository – dictionary – for all SAA machines. He gave no indication of when the 370 versions would appear, but implied that it would be quite soon. IBM launched the AS/400 Office as being easy to learn and use – and the answer to a wide range of customer office requirements today and in the future. Initial features include the obvious ability to create and revise documents and notes, and to include graphs and images in printed documents – for users with Business Graphics Utility as well as Office. Powerful spelling check and hyphenation facilities are included, and it has the doubtful feature of enabling authors to write a document to a chosen reading level and use the proof-reading aid to flag words beyond the specified grade level – US school grades 4 to 16 – if you have the right Language Dictionary. User identitites and pre defined distribution lists are supported for electronic mail and an unknown addressee can be found from the system directory. Diaries are are provided for scheduling daily activities, meetings, conference rooms and equipment – and to start applications at specified dates and times. A separately priced menu-driven Query is designed to enable novices to extract data from the AS/400 database, and incorporate it into documents and reports. Office also includes Application Program Interfaces so that it can be integrated with vertical applications. AS/400 Office is $2,700 to $22,825; dictionaries are $300 apiece, Query is $850 to $7,050; Business Graphics Utility is $1,200 to $7,200, which gives an idea of what Office is likely to cost on other IBM machines. AS/400 Office can be rented for $817 a month for any size machine.
