I installed Office 2003 Beta 2 the other day and for the most part I’m very pleased and feel much of the hype is justified.

In particular, I see a lot of potential with the native XML capabilities — especially with respect to InfoPath. Although, I’m puzzled by Microsoft’s recent announcement that InfoPath will not be included as part of the retail Office 2003 “system”.

Otherwise, I think they did an excellent job with the updated visual prioritization of information in Outlook 2003.

In particular, I’ve found the “reading pane” to be a welcome addition.

However, due primarily to the email viruses and worms that have plagued Outlook, HTML styled messages in Outlook will, by default, not load images that come from remote servers.

e.g. Image links will appear as a broken if a message has an image link to an file that is on a remote web server.

There is a way around this by modifying Outlook’s security settings, but it’s certainly not obvious or advisable.

However, I believe you still can send messages with “embedded” images, but don’t I think it is supported in other mail readers.

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