Releases of Microsoft Office over the past 6 years have been considered evolutionary upgrades, delivering new features with each new version making life a bit easier for authors of Office documents. The release of Office 2000 in 1999 introduced tighter integration with the Web, giving users the ability to flawlessly save documents in HTML format and distribute over the Internet or Intranet, adding stronger ways of accessing information.

In Office XP version 2002, Microsoft improved upon the stance of web integration by sampling with XML, users were able to tag documents adding a bit of intelligence to Office files. Other new features in Office XP included the controversial Task Pane, the aim of which was to make access to common features in the suite more accessible. Office 2003 was more about the client/server experiences; products such as Exchange Server were now a part of what became the Office System and included a number of other products such as Share Portal Server and Office Live Meeting Server.